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HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

No.  89 

Editors: 

HERBERT    FISHER,  M.A.,  F.B.A. 
Prop.   GILBERT    MURRAY,  Litt.D., 

LL.D.,  F.B.A. 
Prof.  J.  ARTHUR    THOMSON,  M.A. 
Prof.  WILLIAM    T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


THE  HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBEARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

16mo    cloth,    50   cents    net,   postpaid 

LITERATURE  AND  ART 

Already  Published 

SHAKESPEARE By  John  Masefield 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MODERN  By  G.  H.  Mair 

ENGLISH    LITERATURE- 
MEDIEVAL  By  W.  P.  Ker 

LANDMARKS     IN     FRENCH 

LITERATURE By  G.  L.  Strachey 

ARCHITECTURE By  W.  R.  Lethaby 

THE    ENGLISH    LANGUAGE   .   .   By  L.  Pearsall  Smith 
WRITING   ENGLISH   PROSE    .    .   By  W.  T.  Brewster 
GREAT  AMERICAN  WRITERS   .  By  W.  P.  Trent  and  John 

Erskine 
DR.  JOHNSON  AND  HIS  CIRCLE  By  John  Bailey 
THE    VICTORIAN   AGE   IN    LIT- 
ERATURE       By  G.   K.   Chesterton 

THE      LITERATURE      OF      GER- 
MANY       By  J.   G.  Robertson 

PAINTERS   AND   PAINTING    .    .   By  Frederick   Wedmore 
SHELLY,  GODWIN,  AND  THEIR 

CIRCLE By  H.   N.   Brailsford 

ANCIENT   ART   AND   RITUAL  .   By  Miss  Jane  Harrison 

EURIPIDES By  Gilbert  Murray 

CHAUCER  AND  HIS  TIMES   .    .    By  Miss  G.   E.   Hadow 
WILLIAM  MORRIS:  HIS  WORK 

AND  INFLUENCE By  A.   C.   Brock 

Future  Issues 

ITALIAN  ART  OF  THE  RENAIS- 
SANCE    By  Roger  E.  Fry 

SCANDINAVIAN  HISTORY  AND 

LITERATURE      By  T.  C.  Snow 

SIR   THOMAS    MORE   AND   HIS 

CIRCLE By  R.  W.  Chambers 

HISTORY    -AND      LITERATURE 

OF    SPAIN By  J.    Fitzmaurice-Kelly 

LATIN  LITERATURE By  J.  S.  Phillimore 

LITERARY   TASTE By  Thomas  Seccombe 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  RUSSIA  .  By  C.  T.  Hagberg  Wright 

THE   RENAISSANCE By  Edith    Sichel 

MILTON By  John   Bailey 


ELIZABETHAN 
LITERATURE 

BY 

JOHN  MACKINNON    ROBERTSON 

M.P. 
AUTHO^^OFLJLiJdOOIAIGN^^ 

"  MODERN    HUMANISTS,"     ETC. 


NEW   YORK 
HENRY   HOLT  AND   COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS    AND    NORGATE 


CONTENTS 


OHAPTEB  PAQB 

I    A  bird's-eye  view      ...  7 

II  PROSE    BEFORE    SIDNEY  .  .  18 

III  POETRY   BEFORE    SPENSER        .  .  42 

IV  SPENSER        .....  66 
V  THE    PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN   DRAMA  .  85 

VI     THE    GREAT   PROSE            .  .  .       117 

VII     POETRY   AFTER   SPENSER  .  .140 

VIII     SHAKESPEARE         .              .  .  .175 

IX     PROSE    FICTION      ....        200 

X     THE    LATER   DRAMATISTS  .  .        224 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   NOTE  .  .253 

INDEX             •              .              .  .  .       255 


SJfMitilMi 


Volumes  of  kindred  interest  already  published  in  the  Library 
are  : 

Chaucer  and  His  Times.     By  Grace  Hadow. 

Shakespeare.     By  John  Masefield. 

English  Literature  :  Mediaeval.     By  Prof.  W.  P.  Ker 

English  Literature  :    Modern.     By  G.  H.  Mair. 

Landmarks  in  French  Literature.     By  G.  L. 
Strachey. 

The  English  Language.     By  L.  Pearsall  Smith. 


ELIZABETHAN 
LITERATURE 

CHAPTER   I 

A  bird's-eye  view 

IN  following  the  growth  of  a  literature,  we 
find  ourselves  after  a  time  driven  to  narrow 
the  working  definition  of  the  subject-matter. 
For  scientific  purposes  there  is  indeed  no 
ultimate  dividing  line  between  what  the 
French  call  "  belles  lettres  " — what  used  to  be 
known  in  English  as  "  polite  letters  "' — and 
other  kinds  of  writing.  Even  handbooks  of 
*'  literature  "  in  the  academic  sense  usually- 
deal  with  the  writers  of  history  and  philo- 
sophy ;  and  a  history  of  nineteenth-century 
literature  could  hardly  omit  Darwin,  though 
that  great  man  is  not  remarkable  for  his  style. 
But  as  books  multiply  and  their  makers 
specialize,  the  survey  of  them  tends  to  divide 
between  histories  of  "  thought  "  and  histories 
of  the  kinds  of  writing  which  have  an  aesthetic 
or  artistic  aim.  Even  here,  the  separation  is 
an  artificial  one,  a  matter  of  convenience  rather 
than  of  fundamental  distinction.     We  cannot 


8_  .ELIZABETHAN.  LITERATURE 

/•      •:•:•:  •  •:-    ^  V  .  : 
:*\:  :•  t,  .  •. 

omit  to  consider  the  way  of  thought  of  the  men 
who  write  plays,  poems,  and  novels  ;  and  even 
if  we  concern  ourselves  mainly  with  the  art 
of  verbal  expression  we  cannot  ignor-e  the  de- 
velopment given  to  that  art  in  scientijBc  or 
didactic  treatises.  But  there  emerges  for  us  in 
such  a  survey  a  general  conception  of  "litera- 
ture "  as  one  of  the  fine  arts ;  a  matter  of 
putting  sincere  thought  or  feeling  in  fine  form ; 
and  the  term  "  fine  letters  "  might  fitly  be  used 
to  describe  it. 

It  is  to  this  aspect  that  any  short  survey  of 
"  Elizabethan  literature  ^'  must  necessarily  be 
addressed.  It  is  of  an  artistic^S£ect  that  we 
think,  first  and  last,  wlien  we  use  the  phrase. 
When  there  began  to  come  over  English 
literature  the  change  which  broadly  marks 
off  that  of  the  nineteenth  century  from  that 
of  the  eighteenth, -aJi£ageiLi:eJbaxn.t#  the  ag^  of 
Sjiakespeare  wasatonce  a  symptom,  an  effect, 
and  a  cause  of  the  afterfltTorT.  "^^riiie  generation 
which  in  its  youth  fed  upon  Wordsworth  and 
Keats  and  Coleridge  and  Scott  found  itself, 
as  it  were,  spiritually  detached  from  the  age  of 
Addison  and  Pope  ;  even  from  the  nearer  age 
of  Gray,  Goldsmith,  and  Johnson.  It  reached 
out  spontaneously  to  the  beautiful  free  way  of 
writing  which  it  saw  in  Spenser  and  Shake- 
speare, finding  there  a  kind  of  delight  that 
was  not  given  by  the  prose  and  poetry  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  which  in  comparison  is  so 
straitened  and  constrained.     Keats,  who  so 


A  BIRD'S-EYE   VIEW  9 

rejoiced  in  Chapman's  translation  of  Homer, 
sounded  the  note  of  revolt  against  a  mode 
of  poetry  which  he  (mistakenly)  regarded  as 
having  been  imposed  upon  his  race  by  the 
French  influence  of  Boileau.  And  that  revo- 
lution in  taste  has  in  the  main  been  permanent, 
though  we  can  now  realize  that  what  happened 
in  the  seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries 
was  not  so  much  a  wilful  adoption  of  French 
models  as  a  development  of  a  kind  of  literary 
bent  which  is  clearly  present  in  the  literature 
of  Elizabeth's  age. 

In  that  literature  there  are  "  two^sgirits^"" 
From  the  first,  it  runs,  ev^nu3X_paintjof..style, 
to  a  pr^cise^aiid^  pedjestrianJdruLoi  verse-^^ 
j^Kfase,  as  well  as  to  a  free  and  beautiful  way      ^ 
jif-Wliting^JChe  Popean  couplet,  the  prosaic    >C 
and  didactic  way  of  viewing  and  describing  ^  / 
life,  the  constrained  way  of  singing,  are  all  to     k 
be  found  in  Tudor  prose  and  verse  down  to  the  i 
Jacobean  period  ;    and  they  never  disappear.  J 
Only,  there  is  the  broad  difference  that  in 
Elizabeth's   later   days   an  inspired  kind   of 
poetry   and   a   stately   and   powerful    prose 
bulked  largely ;    whereas  in  the  seventeenth 
century  the  fettered  and  formal  kind  of  verse 
gradually  got  the  upper  hand,  leading  up  to 
the  general  acceptance  of  the  somewhat  ill- 
named  "  bg^c  "  couplet  as  the  best  verse- 
form  ;    and  the  noble  and  beautiful  way  of 
writing  prose,  though  it  was  even  perfected 
by  the  great  writers  of  the  seventeenth  cen- 


10      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

tury,  at  length  gave  way  to  a  simpler,  a  more 

colloquial,  a  less  dignified  diction.     Thus  we 

/  remember  the  Elizabethan  time  as  that_of  a 

I  great  blankversej  of  the  Spenserian  stanza^ 

/  of   the    Shakespearean    Jyric,    and    of    the 

large  "  Q3;xJiestratedJ.L&entenca ;   whereas  we 

broadly  conceive  of  the  later  "  Augustan  " 

/  period  as  that  of  the  neat  and  cut  sentence, 

the  rhymed  couplet,  and  the  lyric  of  short  and 

low  flight. 

We  shall  do  well,  nevertheless,  not  to  make 
up  our  minds  that  tli£.:wliole.  evolntio^  a 

downward  one,  despite  our  keener  pleasure 
in  the  earlier  styles.  Those  in  fact  "  ran  to 
seed,"  as  the  phrase  goes.  Dramatic  blank 
verse  soon  fell  from  greatness  after  Shake- 
speare ;  even  the  great  epic  verse  of  Milton 
is  perhaps  more  often  skilful  than  inspired  ; 
and  though  Sir  Thomas  Browne  and  Jeremy 
Taylor  remain  for  us  among  the  great  masters 
of  prose  form  and  tone,  their  way  of  writing 
could  not  without  affectation  be  persisted  in 
for  the  purposes  of  Dryden's  literary  criticism 
(which  demanded  his  own  excellent  and  in- 
dividual prose  style),  any  more  than  for  the 
criticism  of  life  which  came  naturally  to  Ad- 
dison and  Swif t.  (^Every  vigorous  age  must 
write  in  its  own  way  ;  and  all  sincere  and  com- 
petent utterance  makes  for  good  writing  of 
some  kind.^  We  can  but  say  that  in  moving 
away  from  the  Elizabethan  modes  English 
literature  lost  something  of  charm  and  splen- 


A  BIRD'S-EYE  VIEW  11 

dour  ;  and  that  to  return  to  these  is  one  of  the 
choice  pleasures  of  the  English-reading  world. 

Much  more  markedly  than  in  the  case  of 
most  period-divisions,  "Elizabethan"  litera- 
ture divides  naturally  and  internally  according 
to  the  historic  label,  at  least  as  regards  its 
rise.  Every  labelled  period,  of  course,  is 
found  to  dovetail  into  its  antecedent ;  and 
the  first  printed  poetry  current  under  Eliza- 
beth was  mostly  written  in  her  father's  reign. 
But  between  1530  and  1580  there  is  none  the 
less  a  difference  as  between  two  eras.  Be- 
tween the  poetry  of  Hawes,  Barclay,  and 
Skelton,  and  the  poetry  of  Wyatt,  Surrey,  '^^ 
Sackville,  and  Spenser  ;  between  the  prose  of 
Elyot  and  Lord  Berners  and  the  prose  of 
Bacon  and  Hooker  ;  between  the  dramatic 
interludes  of  Cornish  and  John  Hey  wood  and 
the  drama  of  Marlowe,  Jonson,  and  Shake- 
speare, there  is  a  far  more  marked  leap  in 
development  than  can  be  noted  in  any 
previous  period  of  three  generations  since 
Chaucer.  There  has  heen  ntTonrp  an  ppochni 
change  in  verse  form,  a  swift  ascent  from  the  \ 
Middle  Ages  to  the  topiBQst  h^^  \ 

Renaissance  in  dramatic  aim  and  achievement, 
and  a  no  less  marvellous  rise  in  prose  dictic 
and  doctrine  from  an  old-world  na^^^^^^  j 

scholastic,  half -rustic,  to  a  deeply  reflective  / 
and  wholly  civilized  way  of  writing  and  / 
ratiocination.  / 

Elizabeth's  age  sets  in  with  an  almost  en- 


12      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

tirely  new  kind  of  verse.  Under  Henry  VIII, 
Stephen  Hawes,  in  the  Pastime  of  Pleasure^ 
and  Barclay,  in  his  free  rendering  of  the  Ger- 
man-Swiss Sebastian  Brandt's  Ship  of  Fools, 
use  a  stanza  which  cannot  be  regularly  scanned 
either  by  accent  or  by  syllables.  Only  in  so- 
called  l)allad  forms  of  verse,  of  v/hich  the  Nut- 
Brown  Maid  remains  the  most  finished  ex- 
ample,  is  the  poetry  of  that  time  regularly  ^^ 
metrical.;  the  average  stanza  verse,  following 
the  wavering  example  of  Lydgate,  has  lost  the 
syllabic  precision  in  which  Hoccleve  still  fol- 
lowed their  elder  contemporary  Chaucer ; 
and  even  when  read  accentually  yields  no 
standardized  rhythm.  There  seems  to  be  a 
positive  reversion  towards  primitive  laxity 
of  technique.  But  in  the  days  of  Edward 
V  and  Mary  there  was  at  work  a  new  leaven, 
^^  though  its  fruits  were  not  to  become  the  com- 
mon possession  till  the  early  days  of  Eliza- 
beth. In  1557  appears  the  famous  TotteVs 
Miscellany  of  Songs  and  Sonnets,  largely  made 
up  of  miscellaneous  verse  by  the  elder  Sir 
Thomas  Wyatt  (d.  1542)  and  Henry  Howard, 
Earl  of  Surrey  (beheaded  1547) ;  and  here  we 
have  together  a  verse  that  is  vernacular  in 
form  and  substance,  and  a  verse  that,  for 
book-readers,  is  new  alike  in  form  and  theme. 
The  vernacular  verse  is  mainly  in  the 
skipping  or  "  jigging  "  iambic  metre  known  as 
the  '*  fourteener,"  a  form  thus  far  incompa- 
tible  with    either    elevation   or   intensity   of 


A  BIRD'S-EYE   VIEW  13 

feeling,  but  lending  itself  readily  to  primitive 
fun,  and  on  that  account  long  to  be  employed 
in  certain  kinds  of  popular  play.  Only  a 
radical  variation  of  its  iambic  movement  could 
raise  it  to  beauty  or  distinction  ;  and  that 
was  not  to  come  till  similar  evolution  had 
occurred  in  other  verse  forms.  The  new  verse 
is  clearly  motiveibyjand  modelled  on  I^ 
g,nd  French  example  ;  the  former  revealing 
itself  in  Wyatt's  free — indeed  loose — use  of 
accentually  scanned  lines,  and  in  the  moraliz- 
ing pieces  in  which  he  anticipates  the  aca- 
demic didacticism  of  a  later  age. 

But  perhaps  the  most  notable  innovation 
of  all  is  the  introduction  ctf  the  personal  love- 
poem,  the  brief  subjective  utterance  which  is 
the  prelude  to  the  Elizabethan  sonnet.  Here 
poetry,  even  if  by  way  of  imitating  foreign 
models,  is  becoming  newly  sincere  and  newly 
arresting,  in  its  resort  to  the  most  universaligr"*"*''^ 
of  all  emotional  and  artistic  motives.  The 
first  aristocratic  poets  have  anticipated  the 
precept  of  a  later  and  more  famous  member 
of  the  tribe  :  they  have  looked  in  their  own 
hearts  for  their  themes,  even  if  they  are 
copying  the  French  and  the  Italians.  Chaucer, 
truly,  had  produced  in  Troilus  and  Criseyde 
a  moving  and  tender  narrative  of  ill-fated 
love,  besides  otherwise  proving  himself  a  true 
poet  in  his  treatment  of  the  love-interest ; 
and  in  Hawes's  Pastime  of  Pleasure  there  are 
cloftr  forecasts  of  the  delicacy  and  intensity  of 


u^^ 


14      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

passion  which  flames  out  in  Romeo  and  Juliet, 
and  which  specially  marks  the  poetry  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  But  Hawes  is  still  tied 
to  the  medieval  machinery  of  dream  and 
allegory  ;  and  his  "  Bell  Pucell  "  is  most  of 
the  time  a  tapestry  figure  in  an  old  allegoric 
romance  of  dragons  and  giants,  the  living 
human  touches  being  apparently  results  of  a 
late  manipulation  which  has  confused  the 
story  by  contradictions  in  the  narrative. 
In  the  short  love-poems  of  Wyatt  and  Surrey 
the  poet  directly  addresses  the  loved  one, 
cruel  or  kind,  false  or  true,  employing  the 
natural  lyric  mode  of  the  troubadours,  but 
with  a  personal  spontaneity  which  rejects 
their  conventions  and  breathes  of  genuine 
feeling. 

Poetry  has  here  ceased  to  be  book-making  ; 
and  the  lyrical  supersedes  the  didactic  motive. 
Hawes,  with  emulous  sympathy,  speaks  of  his 
exemplar  Lydgate  as  ''  making  great  books 
to  live  in  memory  "  ;  but  he  had  not  learned 
that  one  true  song  may  outlive  a  library 
of  didactically  schemed  compositions.  Upon 
that  innovating  stir  of  poetic  impulse  there 
followed,  within  a  quarter  of  a  century,  a  far 
greater  and  more  enduring  artistic  florescence, 
also  stimulated  by  foreign  example,  but 
deeply  rooted  too  in  vernacular  art — the  large 
output  of  the  eager  and  fertile  muse  of  Spenser. 
Here  it  is  that  Elizabethan  narrative  and^  lyric 
poetry  reaches  the  height  of  its  power  and 


A  BIRD'S-EYE  VIEW  15 

luxuriance,  reaching  out  a  magistral  hand  to 
Milton  in  the  next  age,  and  making  possible 
his  epic  by  demonstrating  the  poetic  wealth 
of  the  living  tongue.  For  the  first  time  since 
Chaucer,  England  had  a  poet  of  the  first  rank 
capable  of  inspiring  a  whole  tribe  by  his 
example.  English  rhymed  verse  was  now 
once  for  all  placed  upon  its  modern  basis  of 
regular  metres  or  rhythms ;  and  between 
Spenser's  stanza  and  his  varied  rhyming 
measures  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other 
the  blank  verse  of  the  drama  as  finally  estab- 
lished by  the  triumph  of  Marlowe  and  per- 
fected by  Shakespeare,  the  foundations  of 
modern  English  poetry  were  completely  laid 
within  the  space  of  a  few  years. 

In  drama  the  Elizabethan  innovation  is  the  v' 
most  marked  of  all.  At  the  beginning  of  the 
reign  it  is  still  in  part  lingering  at  the  stage  of 
the  old  interlude  ;  and  such  performances  as 
the  Marian  Respublica  and  Wealth  and  Health, 
and  the  Elizabethan  Impatient  Poverty  and 
John  the  Evangelist,  are  very  much  on  a  par 
with  the  old  morality-play  Mankind,  and 
Henry  Med  wall's  Nature,  both  belonging  to 
the  reign  of  Henry  VII.  What  we  call  the 
"  Elizabethan  drama  "  might  be  separated  by 
a  whole  age  from  the  interlude.  Influenced 
of  course  by  jjJassic  models  and  by  Italian 
and  Spanish  romance  themes,  it  is  a  markedly 
English  product,  specially  evoked  by  social 
and  economic  conditions  peculiar  to  Eliza-f 


16   ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

ijbethan  England.  We  shall  see  that  it  was 
/an  outcome  of  a  mode  of  economic  and  social 
I  freedom  that  was  not  allowed  to  subsist  in 
other  countries  in  that  period,  and  is  in  that 
respect  to  be  causally  connected  with  the 
Reformation,  wherein  the  most  zealous  pro- 
moters of  Protestantism  could  see  nothing 
but  incompatibility  with  the  world  of  the 
theatre. 

But  if  the  Elizabethan  drama  is  a  new  birth 
alike  as  to  form  and  content,  no  less  does 
Elizabethan  prose  tell  of  a  rapid  development 
of  mental  life.  The  intellectual  space  be- 
tween Elyot  and  Hooker,  even  between  Aschani 
and  Bacon,  suggests  an  interval  rather  of  cen- 
turies than  of  one  or  two  generations,  alike  in 
point  of  elaboration  in  thought  and  of  refine- 
ment in  style.  Sir  Thomas  More  indeed  had 
thrown  out  in  his  youth,  under  Henry  VIIT, 
a  work  in  Latin,  the  Utopia,  which  is  quite 
abreast  of  any  Elizabethan  book  in  the  keen- 
ness and  originality  of  its  criticism  of  life  ;  but 
Bacon's  performance  tells  of  a  far  richer  in- 
tellectual soil,  as  it  were,  than  that  out  of 
which  grew  the  lonely  pine  of  his  great  pre- 
decessor. Above  all,  his  partial  resort  to 
English,  albeit  with  strange  individual  mis- 
givings, where  More  had  used  Latin,  tells  of 
more  than  the  earlier  writer's  social  prudence. 
In  the  course  of  the  lives  of  the  father 
and  daughter,  Henry  and  Elizabeth,  English 
literature   passed   from   the   archaic   to   the 


A   BIRD'S-EYE   VIEW  17 

modern,  and  English  life  from   the  medieval 
to  the  ripe  Renaissance. 

The  evolutionj^  it  need  hardly  be  said, 
affected  every  side  of  life.  jPolitically,  the 
nation  had  come  within  sight  of  constitu- 
tionalism, though  an  age  of  tempests  was 
to  pass  before  the  new  principle  was  safely 
established.  In  religion,  it  had  completed  i 
the  breach  with  the  Catholic  Church,  and 
entered  on  an  era  of  religious  strifes  of  a  new 
kind.  Still  in  the  main  illiterate,  the  com- 
mon people  had  now  reached  sources  of 
culture  in  the  drama,  and  in  sermons  aiming 
at  instruction  ;  and  the  tendency  towards 
literacy  was  continuous.  Perhaps  partly  by 
reason  of  the  breach  with  Rome,  England  was 
still  without  native  pictorial  art  or  sculpture : 
but  music  to  some  extent  went  hand-in-hand 
with  poetry  ;  and  architecture  was  markedly 
stimulated  l^  continental  example.  Socially,/ 
old  soil  had  been  in  large  measure  broken  up 
by  economic  changes  ;  and  industry  and  com- 
merce had  begun  to  have  new  outlooks.  In 
physics,  William  Gilbert,  who  died  in  the  same 
year  with  Elizabeth,  had  at  the  age  of  sixty 
laid  the  foundations  of  a  new  science  in  his 
De  Magnete ;  in  his  Latin,  Elizabethans  could 
already  read  of  "  electricity  "  and  ''  electric 
force  "  ;  and  in  1603  William  Harvey  settled 
in  London  as  a  physician,  to  lay  in  his  turn 
new  foundations  of  knowledge.  And  Thomas 
Harriott,   who    had    played    geographer    to 

2 


18      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Raleigh's  second  expedition  to  Virginia,  was 
in  the  same  period  to  effect  important  advances 
in  algebra,*  and,  it  would  seem,  silently  to 
rival  Galileo  in  discovering  the  fact  of  sun- 
spots. 

Science,  however,  was  only  a  promise  when 
Elizabeth  passed  away ;  and  hers,  accord- 
ingly, is  to  be  remembered  as  a  pre-scientific 
age,  in  which  her  wisest  counsellor  was  capable 
of  imploring  an  English  alchemist  in  foreign 
parts  to  turn  his  reputed  discovery  of  the 
philosopher's  stone  to  his  sovereign's  pecu- 
niary benefit.  Literature  was  all  the  freer 
for  the  lack  of  exact  knowledge  ;  and  it  is 
an  eminently  free  intellectual  growth  that  we 
have  now  to  consider. 


CHAPTER   II 

PROSE   BEFORE   SIDNEY 

In  watching  the  progress  of  English  prose 
in  the  sixteenth  century  we  are  made  to  note, 
among  other  things,  how  it  is  that  nations 
get  their  literature.  At  that  stage  one  of  the 
main  incentives  to  modern  writing,  the  hope 
of  gain,  hardly  came  into  play,  save  as  re- 
garded poets  who  counted  on  reward  from 

*  It  is  worth  noting  that  one  Englishman,  Robert 
Recorde  (1557),  invented  the  algebraic  sign  for 
equality  {=),  and  Harriott  those  for  "greater  than  '* 
and  "  less  than  "  (>,  <). 


PROSE  BEFORE   SIDNEY  19 

patrons  ;  and  one  of  the  most  general  modern 
motives  to  reading,  interest  in  fiction,  was 
but  little  catered  for.  Caxton  in  the  fifteenth 
century,  and  Wynkyn  de  Worde  early  in  the 
sixteenth,  printed  a  number  of  translations 
or  adaptations  of  French  historic  romances  ; 
but  the  greatest,  Malory's  Morte  D'ArthuVy 
was  pnly  twice  reprinted  between  1485  and 
1529  ;  there  was  no  original  native  fiction  ; 
and  the  whole  stock  in  circulation  was  small. 
In  the  light  of  modern  experience,  it  would 
seem  to  follow  that  the  reading  class  was  also 
small.  Illiteracy,  indeed,  was  rather  the  rule 
than  the  exception  about  1500  ;  the  move- 
ment of  popular  culture  set  up  by  the  old 
Lollard  schools  having  died  out  in  the  Wars 
of  the  Roses.  According  to  the  reformer 
Tyndale,  even  Latin  scholarship  had  fallen 
very  low  before  the  reign  of  Henry  VII ;  and 
an  independent  English  prose  literature  hardly 
existed.  The  remarkable  work  of  Bishop 
Pecock,  The  Repressor  of  Overmuch  Blaming 
of  the  Clergy,  written  about  1456,  had  never, 
been  printed ;  and  no  English  treatise  of 
equal  intellectual  reach  had  been  produced. 
Indeed,  the  English  of  Pecock  and  of  Sir  John 
Fortescue  would  have  been  found  obsolete  in 
large  part  at  the  time  of  the  Reformation, 
the  first  in  respect  of  his  old  English,  the  latter 
in  respect  of  his  Gallicisms.  And  the  old 
romances,  with  all  their  quiet  charm,  had 
become  partly  archaic. 


20      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

A  Renaissance  visibly  begins  in  England 
with  the  reign  of  Henry  VIII.  Ten  years 
before,  Colet  and  Erasmus  were  teaching 
together  at  Oxford  ;  and  for  the  scholars  the 
accession  of  the  young  King  was  the  promise 
of  a  new  and  better  age.  Politically,  the  hope 
was  ill  fulfilled  :  there  are  few  more  tragical 
contrasts  in  the  history  of  culture  than  that 
between  the  large  vision  and  forecast  of  Sir 
Thomas  More's  youthful  Utopia,  and  the 
struggle  and  mental  constriction  of  his  later 
life.  But  between  the  stimulus  set  up  by 
the  ipreading  knowledge  of  the  new  world 
opened  up  by  Columbus — a  stimulus  seen  at 
work  in  the  Utopia  itself — and  that  of  the  new 
impulsion  set  up  by  Luther,  there  set  in  a  mani- 
fold change  which  perceptibly  begins  the  transi- 
tion from  the  medieval  to  the  modern  period. 
And  the  transformation  takes  place  in  lan- 
guage and  literature  no  less  than  in  polity. 

In  recent  reigns,  prose  had  been  mainly  a 
matter  of  translations  from  the  French  :  now 
there  supervened  for  Englishmen  matters  of 
debate  in  which  they  had  to  write  and  think 
for  themselves.  The  English  which  was  to  be 
written  by  Bacon  can  be  seen  growing  up  in 
the  hands  of  the  Protestant  Reformers,  who 
are  typified  by  Tyndale,  the  translator  of 
the  New  Testament.  They  had,  in  fact,  the 
strongest  motive  to  the  writing  of  readable 
prose,  the  desire  to  make  converts  and  refute 
opponents.     In  Greek  literature,  such  a  mo- 


PROSE   BEFORE   SIDNEY  21 

tive  had  developed  the  prose  of  Plato  ;  in 
Latin  that  of  Cicero  ;  and  in  Tudor  England, 
with  a  less  lasting  matter  to  debate,  it  made 
in  the  due  degree  for  progress.  If  we  contrast 
Tyndale's  controversy  with  Sir  Thomas  More, 
or  his  translation  of  the  Enchiridion  of  Eras- 
mus, with  the  Boke  of  the  Governour  by  Sir 
Thomas  Elyot  (1531),  we  at  once  realize  that 
the  theologian  is  the  more  modern  writer  of  the 
two.  Equally  grounded  with  the  other  in 
Latin,  he  is  at  once  more  idiomatic  and  more 
nimble  in  his  diction,  and  he  is  to-day  the 
more  easily  read  ;  though  Elyot' s  book  has 
the  more  lasting  historical  interest.  Such 
a  sentence  as  this  : 

Although  Philosophers  in  the  description  of  virtues 
have  devised  to  set  them  as  it  were  in  degrees,  having 
respect  to  the  quj^lity  of  the  person  which  is  with  them 
adorned  ;  as  applying  Magnificence  to  the  substance 
and  estate  of  princes,  and  to  private  persons  Benefi- 
cence and  Liberahty,  yet  be  not  these  in  any  part 
defalcate  of  their  condign  praises — 

even  when  put,  as  here,  in  modern  spelling, 
is  scholastically  archaic  in  comparison  with 
the  writings  of  Tyndale,  Coverdale,  Hooper, 
and  Hutchinson.  Elyot  wrote,  indeed,  for 
the  nobility,  his  aim  being  to  train  "  gover- 
nour s  "  ;  and,  following  well-established  lines, 
he  treats  of  schooling,  archery,  dancing,  horse- 
manship, and  all  the  public  and  private 
virtues,  with  the  same  dignified  zeal  and 
stately   elocution.     His   book,   too,   was  re- 


22      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

printed  nine  times  within  the  century,  a  con- 
tinuance of  vogue  not  in  store  for  Tyndale. 
But  EngHsh  prose,  nevertheless,  was  shaped 
rather  by  those  who  wrote  for  the  commons, 
among  whom  the  readers  were  in  large  part 
biased  to  religious  disputation.  Controversy 
can  be  made  at  least  as  dull  as  any  other 
reading  ;  but  success  in  controversy  is  at 
all  events  incompatible  with  dulness  for  those 
)  who  read  ;  and  in  the  long-drawn  warfare 
1  between  Catholics  and  Protestants,  English 
)  prose  acquired  an  elasticity  and  vigour  that 
N.  put  it  for  the  time,^  in  those  respects,  ahead 
'  >ef  the  contemporary  poetry.  Sir  Thomas 
More,  whose  History  of  the  Reign  of  Henry  the 
Seventh  is  written  in  a  nervous  prose  much 
more  modern  in  spirit  than  that  of  some  later 
chroniclers,  did  some  of  his  most  readable 
prose  in  his  acrid  controversy  with  Tyndale  ; 
and  Tyndale  learned  something  of  literary 
technique  in  crossing  swords  with  so  accom- 
plished an  adversary.  The  technique  thus 
acquired  was  naturally  turned  to  the  purposes 
of  constructive  religious  writing.  Sermon- 
making,  from  the  vernacular  and  idiomatic 
directness  of  Latimer  to  the  careful  composi- 
tion of  Archbishop  Sandys,  played  its  part 
in  the  evolution  of  literary  form.  But  that 
species  of  composition  in  turn  was  still  subject 
to  limitations  of  time  and  thought  which 
excluded  it  from  the  rank  of  great  literature. 
Lasting  charm  was  to  be  reached  only  when 


PROSE  BEFORE   SIDNEY  23 

men  with  a  genius  for  style  took  up  enduring 
themes  on  which  they  had  thought  and  felt 
deeply,  or  on  which  their  sheer  faculty  of 
utterance  could  expatiate  with  a  joyous  free- 
dom. Only  thus  can  craftsmanship  become 
fine  art. 

Prose,  much  more  obviously  than  poetry, 
must  always  have  one  foot  in  utility ;  and 
primarily  it  tends  to  plant  both  there.  It  is 
the  last  of  the  fine  arts  of  which  it  could  be 
suggested  that  it  is  to  be  cultivated  "  for  its 
own  sake."  Even  those  arts,  indeed,  con- 
cerning which  that  claim  is  most  often  made — 
music  and  painting — require  some  ground 
either  of  subject  or  of  conscious  emotional 
purpose  to  give  them  vitality.  A  picture 
must  represent  something,  to  be  more  than  a 
mere  arrangement  of  colours  ;  and  music,  to 
be  organic,  needs  some  continuity  of  mood  in 
the  composer.  But  all  of  the  arts  have  more 
immediately  to  do  with  the  quest  of  beauty 
than  has  the  art  of  prose  ;  and  in  an  age  in 
which  even  poetry  was  commonly  vindicated 
as  a  means  of  promoting  virtue,  prose  was 
not  readily  regarded  as  an  artistic  exercise. 
There  is  little  fine  English  prose  before  the 
sixteenth  century.  Such  work  as  Chaucer's 
translation  of  Boethius,  and  the  discourses 
of  the  earnest  mystic  Richard  RoUe  of  Ham- 
pole,  perhaps  represent  best  in  the  previous 
ages  the  possibilities  of  prose  harmony.  But 
as  art  in  some  small  degree  must  enter  into 


24   ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

every  process  of  intellectual  construction,  the 
concern  for  charm,  so  manifest  in  much 
medieval  Latin,  could  not  be  for  ever  excluded 
from  prose  diction  ;  and  it  is  already- manifest 
in  at  least  one  chronicler  of  the  age  of 
Henry  VIII. 

Roger  Ascham,  in  his  Scholemaster,  pub- 
lished in  his  old  age  (1576),  girds  sharply 
I  at  the  ''  indenture  English,"  "  strange  and 
i  inkhorn  terms,'*  ''  words  heaped  one  upon 
^  another,"  and  "  many  sentences  of  one  mean- 
ing clouted  up  together,"  in  the  prose  of  the 
chronicler  Edward  Hall ;  and  it  cannot  be 
denied  that  the  criticism  has  foundation.  But 
it  ignores  the  finer  qualities  of  Hall's  writing. 
Ascham  had  very  little  sense  of  literary  beauty. 
His  ov/n  verse,  in  the  Scholemaster,  is  exe- 
crable, and  his  prose  never  concerns  itself  with 
any  finer  art  than  that  of  clear  statement ; 
save  where  he  develops  the  trick  of  anti- 
thetic clauses  which  was  to  become  an  afflic- 
tion in  the  hands  of  John  Lilly  soon  after- 
wards. This  fashion  made  for  form  as  against 
formlessness,  but  it  soon  becomes  more  irritat- 
ing than  even  tautology.  Hall  had  the  sense 
of  beauty  which  Ascham  lacked  ;  and  his 
prose,  if  mannered  and  laboured,  is  sometimes 
nobly  harmonious.  A  good  example  of  his 
statelier  manner  occurs  in  his  account  of  the 
end  of  Henry  VI : 

\/     The  dead  corpse  of  King  Henry,  with  bills  and 
glaives  pompously  (if  you  call  that  a  funeral  pomp), 


PROSE   BEFORE   SIDNEY  25 

was  conveyed  from  the  Tower  to  the  church  of  Saint 
Paul,  and  there  laid  on  a  bier,  where  it  lay  the  space 
of  an  whole  day  ;  and  the  next  day,  without  priests 
or  clerk,  torch  or  taper,  singing  or  saying,  it  was 
conveyed  to  the  monastery  of  Chertsey,  being  distant 
from  London  XV  mile,  and  there  was  buried,  but 
after  he  was  removed  to  Windsor,  and  there  in  a  new 
vault  newly  intumilate.  .  .  . 

King  Henry  was  of  stature  goodly,  of  body  slender, 
to  which  proportion  all  other  members  were  corre- 
spondent :  his  face  beautiful,  in  the  which  continually 
was  resident  the  bounty  of  mind  with  which  he  was 
inwardly  endued.  He  did  abhor  of  his  own  nature 
all  the  vices  as  well  of  the  body  as  of  the  soul,  and 
from  his  very  infancy  he  was  of  honest  conversation 
and  pure  integrity,  no  brewer  of  evil,  and  a  keeper 
of  all  goodness,  a  despiser  of  all  things  which  wore 
wont  to  cause  the  minds  of  mortal  men  to  slide  or 
appair  [=  worsen].  Beside  this,  patience  was  so 
radicate  in  his  heart,  that  of  all  the  injuries  to  him 
committed  (which  were  no  small  number)  he  never 
asked  vengeance  nor  punishment.  ,  .  . 

By  reason  whereof.  King  Henry  the  seventh,  not 
without  cause,  sued  to  July  [Julius]  Bishop  of  Home 
to  have  him  canonized,  as  other  saints  be  ;  but  the 
fees  of  canonizing  of  a  King  were  of  so  great  a  quantity 
at  Kome  (more  than  the  canonizing  of  a  Bishop  or 
a  prelate,  although  he  sat  in  Saint  Peter's  chair)  that 
the  said  King  thought  it  more  necessary  to  keep  his 
money  at  home,  for  the  profit  of  his  realm  and  country, 
rather  than  to  impover'sh  his  kingdom  for  the  gaining 
of  a  new  holy  day  of  Saint  Henry  :  remitting  to  God 
the  judgment  of  his  will  and  intent.  .  .  . 

Hall  abounds  in  quaint  descriptions  of 
persons,  and  his  pages  are  at  times  lit  up  by 
vivid  portraits,  such  as  that  of  Lady  Eliza-^ 
beth  Grey,  "a  woman  more  of  formal  coun- 


26      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

tenance  than  of  excellent  beauty,"  but  capable 
of  *'  sober  demeanour,  lovely  looking,  and 
feminine  smiling,"  and  that  of  the  unfortunate 
Jane  Shore,  who — by  help  of  the  narrative  of 
Sir  Thomas  More — receives  more  attention 
than  any  of  her  betters.  But  Hall  remains 
under  the  spell  of  rhetoric,  and  loves  to  open 
a  chapter  in  this  wise  : 

When  King  Henry  had  not  only  obtained  this 
triumphant  battle  at  the  plain  of  Bosworth  against 
his  maUcious  enemy  King  Richard,  but  also  by 
glorious  victory  gat  the  diadem  and  possession  of  the 
estate  royal  and  princely  pre-eminence  of  this  f  amoup. 
empire  and  renowned  kingdom,  he  having  both  the 
ingenious  forecast  of  the  subtle  serpent  and  also 
fearing  the  burning  fire  like  an  infant  that  is  a  little 
singed  with  a  small  flame  ;  and  further  vigilantly 
foreseeing  and  prudently  providing  for  doubts  that 
might  accidentally  ensue,  devised,  studied,  and 
compassed  to  extirpate  and  eradicate  all  interior 
seditions  and  apparent  presumptions  which  might 
move  any  tumultuous  rout  or  seditious  conjuration 
against  him  within  his  realm  in  time  to  come. 

The  models  for  this  sonorous  and  colorate 
style  were  to  be  found  in  Latin,  the  only  re- 
fined prose  with  which  English  scholars  were 
yet  familiar  ;  indeed,  for  the  reign  of  Henry 
VII,  Hall  does  little  more  than  translate 
Polydore  Vergil,  the  standard  authority. 
But  he  is  relatively  much  more  ponderous 
than  Polydore,  as  he  is  less  alive  than  More  ; 
and  what  was  too  ornate  and  prolix  for  a 
scholar  like  Ascham  could  not  well  become  a 
popular  art.     To  make  a  true  native  prose 


PROSE   BEFORE   SIDNEY  27 

there  were  needed  other  motives  than  the 
love  of  stateUness  and  sonority ;  and  to 
supply  it  there  were  needed  other  exercises 
than  historical  narrative.  And  the  required 
influences  were  in  large  measure  supplied  by 
what  was  for  half  a  century  in  England  the 
chief  theme  for  prose  writing  and  reading — 
theological  controversy.  From  that  not  very 
promising  quarter  came  an  amount  of  in- 
tellectual and  literary  stimulus  which  has  not 
been  fully  recognized.  In  England,  as  in  Ger- 
many, the  Reformation  controversy  gave  a 
new  abundance  of  employment  to  printers, 
who  in  turn  naturally  favoured  the  Protes- 
tantism that  gave  them  work ;  and  the 
multiplication  of  printers  and  printing-presses 
was  a  new  invitation  to  literary  activity,  which 
it  facilitated.  In  Italy,  indeed,  there  was  an 
abundant  literature  before  and  apart  from 
theological  controversy ;  but  in  Germany 
and  England  the  Reformation  was  the  gate- 
way to  letters  for  the  nlass  of  the  people.  In 
the  latter  days  of  Elizabeth,*  readers  and 
printers  must  have  multiplied  to  fully  thrice 
the  number  that  existed  under  Henry  VIII. 

The  same  interest,  turned  to  the  purposes 
of  narrative,  elicited  the  vast  work  of  Fox, 
The  Acts  and  Monuments  of  the  Martyrs. 
Swelled  by  controversial  purpose  into  a  his- 
torico-controversial  survey  of  all  ecclesiastical 
history,  this  compilation  (1563-70)  not  only 
won  wide  popularity  in  its  own  day,  but  re- 


28      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

mained  one  of  the  most  familiar  of  Eliza- 
bethan prose  books  down  till  the  nineteenth 
century.  Here  we  have  an  abundant  and 
scholarly  vocabulary  (Fox  avowedly  would 
have  preferred  to  write  in  Latin,  as  he  had 
done  in  his  earlier  editions),  handled,  how- 
ever, with  a  business-like  concern  for  edifica- 
tion rather  than  with  an  eye  to  literary  charm  ; 
so  that  the  effect  is  one  of  a  general  alacrity 
of  movement.  Not  very  trustworthy  as 
history,  the  book  is  good  English.  Ascham 
could  have  found  no  fault  with  it,  shunning 
as  it  did  the  faults  of  Hall.  And  yet  another 
serious  interest,  at  work  before  the  advent 
of  Elizabeth,  and  widely  expanded  in  her 
time,  served  to  quicken  diction,  even  as  it 
did  to  attract  readers.  In  the  writings  and 
translations  of  Richard  Eden,  the  cosmo- 
grapher,  of  which  Jhis_treatise  Of  the  Newe 
India  (1553)  is  the  first,  we  realize  the  virtue 
of  precise  narrative  as  a  determinant  of  prose 
form.  In  his  prefaces,  writing  at  large,  Eden 
is  ill-girt  and  voluble,  his  style  running  to 
shapeless  sentences  and  loose  constructions. 
In  his  narrative,  following  or  .translating 
foreign  testimonies,  he  is  concise,  plain,  and 
perspicuous,  yet  with  a  breadth  of  phrase 
that  at  times  attains  to  poetry,  and  yields  a 
foretaste  of  that  stately  and  felicitous  diction 
which  we  rank  par  excellence  as  Elizabethan. 
It  has  for  us  that  benefit  of  remoteness  which 
is  the  special  charm  of  long  bygone  art ;   but 


PROSE   BEFORE   SIDNEY  29 

also  that  of  diction  still  unhackneyed.     For 
instance : 

But  let  us  entreat  somiawhat  of  the  particulars  of 
the  regions.  In  the  province  of  Caizcima,  within  the 
great  gulf  of  the  beginning,  there  is  a  great  cave  in  a 
hollow  rock  under  the  root  of  a  high  mountain,  about 
two  furlongs  from  the  sea.  The  entery  of  this  cave 
is  not  much  unlike  the  doors  of  a  great  temple,  being 
very  large  and  turning  many  ways.  Andreas  Moralis 
the  shipmaster,  at  the  commandment  of  the  governor, 
tempted  to  search  the  cave  with  the  smallest  vessels. 
He  saith  that  by  certain  privy  ways  many  rivers  have 
concourse  to  this  cave  as  it  were  to  a  sink  or  channel. 
After  the  experience  hereof,  they  ceased  to  marvel 
whither  other  rivers  ran,  which  coming  fourscore  and 
ten  miles  were  swallowed  up,  so  that  they  appeared 
no  more,  nor  yet  fell  into  the  sea  by  any  knowen  ways. 
Now  therefore  they  suppose  that  rivers  swallowed 
up  by  the  stony  places  of  that  mountain  fall  into  this 
cave.  As  the  shipmaster  entered  into  the  cave  his 
ship  was  almost  swallowed.  For  he  saith  that  there 
are  many  whirlpools  or  risings  or  boilings  of  the 
water,  which  make  a  violent  conflict  and  horrible 
roaring,  one  encountering  the  other.  Also  many  huge 
holes  and  hollow  places.  So  that  what  on  the  one 
side  with  the  whirlpools,  and  on  the  other  side  with 
the  boiling  of  the  water,  his  ship  was  long  in  manner 
tossed  up  and  down  like  a  ball.  It  greatly  repented 
him  that  he  had  entered,  yet  knew  he  no  way  how  to 
come  forth.  He  now  wandered  in  the  darkness,  as 
well  for  the  obscureness  of  the  cave  into  the  which 
he  was  far  entered,  as  also  in  that  in  it  were  thick 
clouds  engendered  of  the  moist  vapours  proceeding  of 
the  conflict  of  the  waters  which  with  great  violence 
fall  into  the  cave  on  every  side.  He  compareth  the 
noise  of  these  waters  to  the  fall  of  the  famous  river 
of  Nilus  from  the  mountains  of  Ethyope.  They  were 
all  so  deaf  that  one  could  not  hear  what  another  said. 


so      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

But  at  the  length  with  great  danger  and  fear  he  came 
forth  of  the  cave  as  it  had  been  out  of  hell. 

Thus  does  he  tell  of  the  wonders  of  the 
golden  tree  ;  of  which  the  root  "  extehdeth  to 
the  centre  of  the  earth  and  there  taketh 
nourishment  of  increase  "  ;  of  the  marvellous 
great  fish  Matum,  who  is  "  slow  of  moving,  of 
condition  meek,  gentle,  associable,  and  lov- 
ing to  mankind,  and  of  a  marvellous  sense  of 
memorie,  as  are  the  elephant  or  the  delphin  "  ; 
and  of  the  city  of  Tyrma  in  the  Fortunate 
Isles,  "builded  upon  a  high  rock,  from  the 
which  many  were  wont  with  joyful  minds 
and  songs  to  cast  themselves  down  headlong, 
being  persuaded  by  their  priests  that  the 
souls  of  all  such  as  so  died  for  the  love  of 
Tyrma  should  thereby  enjoy  eternal  felicity." 
There  is  nothing  quite  so  fairylandish  in 
Hakluyt's  Voyages. 

Thus  out  of  living  interests  there  grew  a 
living  prose  ;  and  the  nation  got  its  books 
through  the  zealous  service  of  men  otherwise 
provided  for,  well  or  ill,  than  by  any  profit 
the  sales  could  bring  them.  Despite  con- 
fiscations of  ancient  endowments  in  the 
political  scramble  of  the  Reformation,  educa- 
tion went  forward  ;  and  though  the  succes- 
sive translations  of  the  Bible  were  not  at  all 
so  eagerly  bought  up  as  the  later  tradition 
has  it,  their  authoritative  circulation  went 
for  much  in  spreading  the  habit  of  reading, 
so  necessary  to  the  building  up  of  a  Protestant 


PROSE  BEFORE   SIDNEY  31 

public  opinion.  Above  all,  the  Bible  was  the 
most  generally  interesting  volume  then  in 
existence.  Here  was  a  whole  manifold  litera- 
ture, at  once  sacrosanct  and  attractive,  ren- 
dered in  a  style  which  was  for  the  most  part 
dignified,  simple,  and  harmonious.  For  the 
Authorized  Version  is  but  one  of  a  series  of 
revisions  dating  from  the  reign  of  Henry  VIII. 
Its  language  and  its  cadences  are  those  of 
the  sixteenth  century,  modelled,  however, 
partly  on  those  of  the  Vulgate,  and  touched 
above  all  with  a  certain  heightening  strange- 
ness of  phrase  through  the  felt  necessity  of 
translating  Hebrew  idiom  with  a  strict  fidelity 
which  was  not  sought  for  in  versions  of  the 
pagan  classics.  As  a  translation,  it  belongs  J 
essentially  to  the  Tudor  century.  The  Great_ } 
Bible  of  1539,  a  result  of  the  work  of  Tyndale  f 
and  Rogers,  revised  by  Coverdale,  is  cor- 
rected and  refined  upon  by  the  Geneva  ver- 
sion of  1560,  as  that  is  in  turn  by  the  Bishops' 
Bible  of  1569.  The  Authorized  Version  (1611) 
does  but  select  from  and  in  general  rec- 
tify their  renderings,  frequently,  though  not 
always,  improving  their  phrase,  but  always 
observing  their  style.  Its  literary  merit,  as 
English  prose,  is  thus  corporate. 

What  the  translation  did  for  English  writ- 
ing was,  substantially,  to  check  the  tendency 
to  formlessness  in  sentence-making,  by  giving 
authoritative  status  to  a  method  of  short 
clauses,   simply  balanced.     But  prose   style 


32   ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

could  not  without  loss  be  restricted  to  that 
method.  Style,  like  matter,  to  be  sound 
must  be  sincere ;  and  sincere  prose  must 
always  grow  out  of  normal  speech,  raising 
it  indeed  to  a  higher  power  and  order,  but 
listening  always  to  its  instincts.  Only  thus 
can  style  be  saved  from  convention,  the 
''  common  moth  "  of  literature  as  of  all  the 
arts.  But  it  has  been  strangely  difficult  for 
both  prose  and  verse  to  escape  that  disease. 
Only  the  masters  can  combine  spontaneity 
with  pregnancy  and  with  beauty  of  form. 
We  have  cause  to  be  thankful  if  we  get  even 
the  first  two  without  the  third,  the  search  for 
which  so  often  means  the  loss  of  the  others. 
And  various  forms  of  ultimately  repellent 
convention  had  a  long  lease  of  fashion  in  the 
sixteenth  century. 

A  book  published  in  Elyot's  day  reveals 
the  persistence  of  a  special  taste  for  artificial 
form  among  the  upper  classes.  In  1534,  Lord 
Berners  produced,  under  the  title  of  The 
Golden  Book  of  Marcus  Aurelius,  a  transla- 
tion of  the  French  version  of  the  Libro  Aureo 
del  emperador  Marco  Aurelio  of  the  Spanish 
ecclesiastic  Guevara,  in  an  English  even  less 
idiomatic  than  that  of  Elyot,  the  construc- 
tions being  often  purely  French  or  Latinist. 
Following  a  highly  mannered  model,  Berners, 
who  had  for  years  been  governor  of  Calais, 
is  much  less  natural  than  in  his  versions  of 
Huon  of  Bordeaux  and  of  FroissarVs  Chronicle. 


PROSE   BEFORE   SIDNEY  83 

The  book  itself,  modish,  falsetto,  plati- 
tudinous, is  to-daj  almost  unreadable.  Yet 
that  too  went  into  some  thirteen  editions  : 
and  when  the  diction  of  Lord  Berners  had 
become  too  old-fashioned,  Sir  Thomas  North, 
who  was  later  to  translate  Plutarch^s  Lives 
from  the  French  version  of  Amyot,  produced 
a  fresh  rendering  from  the  French  of  the 
expanded  version  of  the  original  work  of 
Guevara  under  its  sub-title.  The  Dial  of 
Princes^  which  in  turn  went  into  many  re- 
prints. The  thin  sententiousness  of  Guevara 
had  an  apparently  irresistible  attraction  for 
upper-class  England  in  that  age,  as  indeed  it 
had  for  Europe  in  general.  It  is  stated  by 
Casaubon  that  almost  no  book  save  the  Bible 
was  so  often  translated  and  reprinted  ;  and 
we  shall  find  his  influence  strongly  at  work 
down  till  the  nineties.  The  explanation 
would  seem  to  be  that  his  artificial  and  minc- 
ing style,  which  made  constant  play  with  the 
rhetorical  device  of  antithesis,  and  strove 
uneasily  after  Latin  effects  of  epigram,  gave 
a  kind  of  pleasure  which  in  its  nature  was 
artistic,  though  the  art  was  cheap  and  the 
taste  pleased  by  it  inevitably  crude.  Men 
and  women  read  by  the  yard  this  sort  of  thing 
in  Guevara : 

For  there  is  nothing  so  hard  but  it  is  made  soft ; 
nor  kept  so  close,  but  it  may  be  seen  ;  nor  so  subtile, 
but  it  may  be  felt  ;  nor  so  dark,  but  it  may  be 
lighted  ;  nor  so  profound,  but  it  may  be  discovered ; 

3 


84      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

nor  so  dissevered,  but  it  may  be  gathered  together  ; 
nor  so  lost,  but  it  may  be  found  ;  nor  so  impossible, 
but  it  may  be  conserved,  if  with  all  our  hearts  we 
occupy  our  powers  in  good  exercises,  and  apply  our 
understanding  in  high  things.  Right  dear  lord,  I 
demand  of  you,  what  profit  is  it  to  the  mariner  to 
know  the  card  of  the  sea,  and  after  to  perish  in  a 
torment  or  tempest  ?  What  profit  is  it  to  a  captain 
to  speak  much  of  war,  and  after  not  know  how  to  give 
battle  ?  What  profiteth  it  to  a  knight  to  have  a  good 
horse  and  to  fall  in  the  street  ?  What  profiteth  it 
to  one  to  teach  another  the  plain  way,  and  himself 
to  wander  aside  ? 

The  commonplace  quality  of  the  thought 
seems  to  have  concurred  with  the  trick  of 
the  style  in  v^inning  the  public.  The  transla- 
tion of  the  famous  Cortigiano  (The  Courtier) 
of  the  Italian  Castiglione,  published  by  Sir 
Thomas  Hoby  in  1561,  has  much  better  style ; 
and  there  we  find  neither  antithesis  nor 
alliteration,  neither  pedantry  nor  crudity. 
It  was  to  Hoby  that  Sir  John  Cheke  addressed 
his  famous  letter,  marvellously  spelt,  enjoin- 
ing ''  that  our  own  tongue  should  be  written 
clean  and  pure,  unmixed  and  unmangled  with 
borrowing  of  other  tongues,  wherein  if  we 
take  not  heed  by  time,  ever  borrowing  and 
never  paying,  she  shall  be  fain  to  keep  her 
house  as  a  bankrupt."  What  Sir  John 
meant  by  "  never  paying  "  is  not  clear  ;  but 
he  had  no  cause  to  complain  of  Hoby,  who, 
rendering  an  author  whose  style  was  easily 
pellucid,  inasmuch  as  it  conveyed  nothing 
that  was  hard  to  say,  makes  shift  very  credit- 


PROSE   BEFORE   SIDNEY  35 

ably  with  the  current  EngHsh  of  his  day — 
that  is,  the  early  part  of  the  reign  of  Mary. 
Its  most  obvious  weakness  is  the  prolixity 
engendered  by  fear  of  new  words  ;  and  in 
the  anxiety  on  this  score  there  is  perhaps 
something  of  undue  subservience  to  the 
counsel  of  Castiglione,  thus  rendered  by  his 
translator  (italics  ours): 

To  eschew  as  much  as  a  man  may,  and  as  a  sharp 
and  dangerous  rock,  affectation  or  curiosity  [=  oddity] 
and  (to  speak  a  new  word)  to  use  in  everything  a 
certain  Reckelessness,  to  cover  art  withall,  and  seem 
whatsoever  he  doeth  and  sayeth  to  do  it  without 
pain,  and  (as  it  were)  not  minding  it.  And  of  this 
do  I  beHeve  grace  is  much  derived,  for  in  rare  matters 
and  well  brought  to  pass  every  man  knoweth  the  hard- 
ness of  them,  so  that  a  readiness  therein  maketh 
great  wonder.  And  contrarwise  to  use  force,  and  (as 
they  say)  to  hale  by  the  hair,  giveth  a  great  disgrace, 
and  maketh  everything,  how  great  soever  it  be,  to 
be  Httle  esteemed.  Therefore  that  may  be  said  to  be 
a  very  art  that  appeareth  not  to  be  art,  neither  ought 
a  man  to  put  more  diligence  in  anything  than  in  covering 
it ;  for  in  case  it  be  open  it  loseth  credit  clean,  and 
inaketh  a  man  little  set  by.  And  I  remember  that  I 
have  read  in  my  days  that  there  were  some  most 
excellent  orators,  which  among  other  their  cares 
enforced  themselves  to  make  every  man  believe  that 
they  had  no  sight  in  letters,  and  dissembling  their 
cunning,  m^de  semblant  their  orations  to  be  made  very 
simply,  and  rather  as  nature  and  truth  led  them  than 
study  and  art,  the  which  if  it  had  been  openly  known, 
would  have  put  a  doubt  in  the  people's  mind  for  fear 
lest  he  beguiled  them.  You  may  see  then  how  to  show 
art  and  such  bent  study  taketh  away  the  grace  of 
everything. 


36      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

But  the  prolixity  is  graceful,  for  the  trans- 
lator has  caught  something  of  the  finished 
simplicity  of  his  original.  Commonplace  for 
commonplace,  that  of  the  Italian  book  is 
natural  and  unpretentious  where  that  of  the 
Spaniard  is  forced  and  pompous.  It  might 
have  been  expected  that  such  a  book,  handling 
themes  of  very  general  interest,  would  have 
had  the  widest  popularity ;  but,  whether 
through  distrust  of  Italian  counsels  or  aver- 
sion to  the  craft  of  the  courtier,  Hoby's 
version  had  only  four  editions  in  Elizabeth's 
long  reign  ;  and  the  natural  style  which  he 
cultivated  did  not  win  the  flattery  of  imita- 
tion. The  jingling  antitheses  of  Guevara 
seem  to  have  gained  him  by  far  the  wider 
audience.  Ascham,  who  praises  Castiglione 
highly,  and  who  in  his  rage  at  extravagant 
fashions  would  have  rulers  put  down  ''  des- 
perate hats,"  was  not  proof  against  fashion 
in  sentence-making,  and  paid  his  tribute  to 
the  Spaniard  in  the  only  attempts  he  made 
at  style : 

For  great  ships  require  costly  tackling,  and  also 
afterward  dangerous  government :  small  boats  be 
neither  very  chargeable  in  making  nor  very  oft  in 
great  jeopardy  ;  and  yet  they  carry,  many  times,  as 
good  and  costly  ware  as  greater  vessels  do.  A  mean 
argument  may  easily  bear  the  light  burden  of  a  small 
fault.  ...  A  high  title  doth  charge  a  man  with  the 
heavy  burden  of  too  great  a  promise.  .  .  . 

And  thus  you  see  how  will  enticed  to  wantonness 
doth  easily  allure  the  mind  to  false  opinions  ;  and  how 


PROSE  BEFORE  SIDNEY  37 

corrupt  manners  in  living  breed  false  judgments  in 
doctrine  ;  how  sin  and  fleshliness  bring  forth  sects 
and  heresies.  And  therefore  suffer  not  vain  books 
to  breed  vanity  in  men's  wills,  if  you  would  have 
God's  truth  take  root  in  men's  minds. 

Pursuit  of  the  fashion  had  led  the  critic 
into  the  very  sin  of  heaping  up  words  and 
clauses  "  of  one  meaning "  which  he  had 
charged  upon  Hall. 

But  the  occasional  Guevarisms  of  Ascham 
are  as  a  mere  pattering  of  drops  in  premoni- 
tion of  the  thunder-shower  to  come  from 
Lilly  in  his  EuphueSy  the  Anatomy  of  Wit^ 
and  Euphues  and  his  England  (1579  and  1580). 
Lilly  as  prose-writer  has  two  ruling  passions, 
to  be  didactic  and  aphoristic,  and  to  keep 
his  readers  stimulatecTB^y^aT perpetual  rattle 
of  artifieial  parallels  and  more  artificial  anti- 
theses. By  common  consent,  he  did  this 
more  powerfully  than  any  of  his  predecessors  : 
Guevara  is  somniferous  in  comparison  ;  but 
for  any  healthy  palate  any  volume  of  sermons 
of  the  age  supplies  more  agreeable  prose. 
Thus  he  begins  : 

There  dwelt  in  Athens  a  young  gentleman  of  great 
patrimony,  and  of  so  comely  a  personage  that  it  was 
doubted  whether  he  was  more  bound  to  Nature  for  the 
lineaments  of  his  person,  or  to  Fortune  for  the  in- 
crease of  his  possessions. 

And  thus  he  ends : 

But  were  the  truth  known,  I  am  sure.  Gentlemen,  it 
would  be  a  hard  question  among  Ladies  whether 


38      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Philautus  were  a  better  wooer  or  a  husband,  whether 
Euphues  were  a  better  lover  or  a  scholar.  But  let 
the  one  mark  the  other.  I  leave  them  both  to  confer 
at  their  next  meeting,  and  commit  you  to  the  Almighty. 

All  the  while  between,  the  style  has  gone 
thus,  with  the  mechanical  vivacity  of  broad- 
sword fencing  on  the  stage  ;  and  to  the  tic- 
tac  of  parallelism  there  has  been  chronically 
added  a  secondary  movement  of  metaphor 
from  natural  history,  normal  and  legendary  : 

As  therefore  the  sweetest  rose  hath  his  prickell, 
the  finest  velvet  his  brack,  so  the  sharpest  wit  hath 
his  wanton  will,  and  the  holiest  head  his  wicked  way. 

The  fine  chrystal  is  sooner  erased  than  the  hard 
marble  ;  the  greenest  beech  browneth  faster  than  the 
dryest  oak  ;  the  fairest  silk  is  soonest  soiled  ;  and 
the  sweetest  wine  turneth  to  the  sharpest  vinegar. 

The  bird  Taurus  hath  a  great  voice  but  a  small 
body  :  the  thunder  a  great  clap  yet  but  a  little  stone  ; 
the  empty  vessel  giveth  a  greater  sound  than  the  full 
barrel. 

Although  iron  the  more  it  is  used  the  brighter  it 
is,  yet  silver  with  much  wearing  doth  waste  to  nothing : 
though  the  cammock  the  more  it  is  bowed  the  better 
it  serveth,  yet  the  bow  the  more  it  is  bent  and  occupied 
the  weaker  it  waxeth  :  though  the  camomill  the 
more  it  is  trocfcden  and  pressed  down,  the  more  it 
spreadeth,  yet  the  violet  the  oftener  it  is  handled 
and  touched  the  sooner  it  decayeth. 

Touching  the  yielding  to  love,  albeit  their  hearts 
seem  tender,  yet  they  harden  them  like  the  stone 
of  Sicilia,  the  which  the  more  it  is  beaten  the  harder 
it  is. 


PROSE   BEFORE  SIDNEY  39 

Though  the  stone  Cylindrus  at  every  thunder-clap 
roll  from  the  hill,  yet  the  pure  sleek  stone  mounteth 
at  the  noise  ;  though  the  rust  fret  the  hardest  steel, 
yet  doth  it  not  eat  into  the  emerald  ;  though  polypus 
change  his  hue,  yet  the  salamander  keepeth  his  colour  ; 
though  . . .  yet .  . .  ;  though  . . .  yet .  . .  ;  though  . . , 
yet  .  .  .  ! 

At  times  something  goes  wrong  with  the 
works,  and  we  get  the  like  of  this : 

Seeing  therefore  one  may  love  the  clear  conduit 
water  though  he  loath  the  muddy  ditch,  and  wear  the 
precious  diamond  though  he  despise  the  ragged  brick, 
I  think  one  may  also  with  safe  conscience  reverence 
the  modest  sex  of  honest  maidens  though  he  forswear 
the  lewd  sort  of  unchaste  minions. 

It  must  have  been  a  very  cumbrous  prose 
movement  to  which  this  St.  Vitus'  dance  could 
come  as  a  relief.  But  a  relief  it  must  have 
been ;  for  not  only  was  Lilly  immensely 
popular  in  the  upper  circles  for  a  generation, 
but  the  tale-writer,  Robert  Greene,  found  his 
account  in  copying  his  tricks  through  a  whole 
series  of  loquacious  romances,  heaping  parallels 
on  parallels,  antitheses  upon  antitheses,  stones 
upon  stones.  Lilly,  to  do  him  justice,  had 
the  regulation  moral  purpose,  and  added 
pedagogy  to  satire  and  type-portraiture,  re- 
peating the  standing  doctrine  of  Plutarch, 
Guevara,  Vives,  Elyot,  and  Ascham  as  to  the 
all-importance  of  sound  schoolmastership ; 
besides  undertaking  to  convert  atheists  to 
orthodoxy  by  vituperative  argument.  Above 
all,   he  had  the  practical  attraction  which 


40      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

gives  temporary  vogue  to  so  much  second- 
rate  fiction  in  every  age :  that  of  being 
energetically  alive  up  to  the  Hmits  of  his 
creative  and  reflective  faculties.  Learned  he 
really  was  ;  and  people  without  fineness  of 
taste  found  his  prose  sparkling,  witty,  effer- 
vescent, ''  topical."  Thus  it  came  about 
that  just  before  the  great  period  of  prose 
which  fell  between  the  Armada  and  the  death 
of  Elizabeth  he  figured  in  the  fashionable 
world  as  the  fine  flower  of  literary  art.  It  is 
none  the  less  his  hard  fate  to  be  remembered 
in  terms  of  the  invective  of  Drayton,  or,  more 
pleasantly,  of  the  parody  put  in  the  mouth 
of  Falstaff  by  the  young  Shakespeare,  whose 
unerring  laugh  so  happily  immortalized  so 
many  of  the  literary  extravagances  of  his 
time. 

For  the  rest,  the  right  kind  of  prose,  the 
prose  that  can  be  read  with  satisfaction  after 
three  hundred  years,  was  evolved  in  the 
natural  way  of  adapting  means  to  worthy 
ends.  Given  something  to  say  that  was  worth 
saying,  the  sincere  writer  had  to  look  to  his 
vocabulary ;  and  here  he  had  to  steer  between 
the  extremes  of  the  over-Latinizing  school 
and  the  school  which  flouted  all  new  or  recent 
coinages  as  inkhorn  terms.  Sir  John  Cheke, 
who  counselled  Hoby,  as  we  saw,  to  beware 
of  borrowing  from  other  tongues,  was  himself 
guilty  of  the  queerest  freaks  of  classicism  as 
well  as  of  nationalism  in  his  translation  of  part 


PROSE   BEFORE   SIDNEY  41 

of  the  New  Testament — freaks  such  as  "  pro- 
sents  "  for  "  apostles,"  and  ''  mooned  "  for 
"  lunatic  "  ;  and  in  the  very  giving  of  the 
restrictive  counsel  cancels  it.  Other  tongues, 
above  all  Latin,  simply  had  to  be  borrowed 
from,  if  English  was  to  be  equal  to  its  growing 
tasks  ;  and  the  early  Reformers  and  the  later 
translators  alike  saw  to  such  expansion. 
Thomas  Wilson,  who  published  his  Arte  of 
Rhetorique  under  Edward  VI  in  1553,  and  ex- 
panded it  in  1560,  anticipates  Cheke's  protest 
and  lives  up  to  his  own  ideal.  The  result  is  a 
mass  of  voluble  and  undistinguished  English 
vernacular  at  the  price  of  prolixity  and  super- 
ficiality, Wilson  being  simply  an  energetic 
person  with  a  good  education  and  a  capacity 
to  talk  spontaneous  commonplace  at  any 
length  upon  any  theme.  There  is  not  a 
memorable  sentence  in  his  books.  His  un- 
consciousness of  the  need  for  new  vocabulary 
was  of  a  piece  with  the  triteness  of  his  thought 
and  the  vagueness  of  his  analysis  of  his  own 
subject-matter,  which  he  handles  with  a  quite 
primitive  simplicity,  having  apparently  no 
knowledge  of  the  work  done  by  the  scholastics. 
He  has  earned  benevolent  perusal,  indeed,  by 
his  hearty  gusto  and  his  public  spirit,  which 
made  him  a  fit  Secretary  of  State ;  but  the 
laying  on  of  his  hands  gave  no  grace  to  our 
written  speech. 

For  the  building  of  a  worthy  prose  there  i 
were  needed  both  scholarship  and  thought,] 


42      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

both  borrowing  from  other  tongues  and  con- 
cern for  native  idiom,  both  concern  for  edifica- 
tion and  that  concern  for  beauty  which,  in 
fortunate  times,  gives  lovehness  to- common 
implements.  Language,  hke  furniture,  may 
be  a  bare  means  of  service,  an  ill-proportioned 
and  ill-coloured  display,  or  a  thing  at  once 
serviceable  and  restfuUy  beautiful  to  look  / 
upon.  l^Our  gratitude  will  always  go  out,  in  ^ 
both  cases,  to  those  who  reconcile  utility  with 
beauty,  and  sanity  with  charm,  "^j 


CHAPTER   III 

POETRY  BEFORE  SPENSER 

\  The  appearance,  in  1557,  of  TotteVs  Mis- 
\cellany  of  Songs  and  Sonnets  marks  the 
I  effective  emergence  of  what  we  regard  as 
regular  modern  verse,  with  a  purely  English  4 
accentuation.  Not  that  such  verse  was  a 
new  creation  :  to  say  nothing  of  occasional 
stanzas  in  old  ballads  or  in  the  mystery  plays, 
in  which  accentual  measure  is  happily  kept 
without  return  to  Chaucerian  scansions,  the 
brilliant  dramatic  ballad  or  duet  of  the  Nut- 
\  Brown  Maid,  which  dates  before  1503,  is 
quite  regularly  rhythmical,  albeit  with  oc- 
casional changes  of  accent  and  Chaucerian 
"  e's,"  and  a  certain  primitive  marking  of 
the  caesura.     In  the  Coventry  Mysteries  (MS. 


POETRY  BEFORE   SPENSER       43 

1468)  we  find  such  lines  as  these,  spoken  by 
Eve: 

Alas  !   that  ever  that  speech  was  spoken 
That  the  false  angel  said  unto  me  : 

Alas  !    our  Maker's  bidding  is  broken. 
For  I  have  touched  His  own  dear  tree ; 

where  a  quite  modern  freedom  of  movement  is 
attained,  with  modern  pronunciation.  This 
was  presumably  the  work  of  a  gifted  monk.' 
The  author  (or  authoress)  of  the  Nut-Brown 
Maid  was  also  a  cultured  person,  who  pro- 
bably knew  French  and  Italian ;  but  he 
handles  English  metre  with  a  firm  and  skilful, 
touch,  marking  his  caesura  with  a  rhyme  : 

Yet  take  good  hede,  for  ever  I  drede 

That  ye  could  not  sustain 
The  thorny  ways,  the  deep  valleys. 

The  snow,  the  frost,  the  rain  ; 
The  cold,  the  heat ;    for  dry  or  wete 

We  must  lodge  on  the  plain  ; 
And  us  above,  none  other  rofe 

But  a  brake  bush  or  twain  : 
Which  soon  should  grieve  you,  I  believe. 

And  ye  would  gladly  than 
That  I  had  to  the  greenwood  go  * 

Alone,  a  banished  man. 

This  duet  may  or  may  not  have  been  written 
for  singing  :  either  way  it  would  seem  bound 
to  be  popular.  Yet,  perhaps  by  reason  of  its 
very  tunefulness,  it  had  no  imitators,  save  in 
devotional  verse  ;  and  at  1550  English  regular 
verse  was  represented  mainly  by  Sternhold 

♦  Gone. 


44      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

and  Hopkins's  versions  of  the  Psalms,  in  which 
the  "  fourteener  "  was  merely  cut  up  into 
quatrains  of  eight-  and  of  six-syllabled  lines 
of  which  only  the  second  and  fourth  rhymed. 
It  was  left  to  Wyatt  and  Surrey,  whose  post- 
humous poems  formed  the  main  attraction  of 
Tottel's  publication  of  1557,  to  effect  a  new 
departure  by  a  free  assimilation  of  both  Italian 
and  French  poetry,  in  which  both  themes  and 
measures  broke  fresh  ground.  As  in  Chaucer's 
own  case,  the  impact  of  the  poetry  of  a  people 
who  were  psychologically  more  advanced 
than  the  English  opened  a  new  period. 

Beyond  question,  Wyatt  gave  the  lead  to 
Surrey,  who  avows  his  discipleship  ;  but  it 
seems  certain  that  Wyatt  began  translating 
from  the  Italian  without  any  clear  notion  of 
metre,  or  at  least  without  any  concern  to 
observe  it.  In  reading  him,  of  course,  we 
must  remember  that  early  Tudor  pronuncia- 
tion differed  at  many  points  from  ours  ;  so 
that  when  Wyatt  makes  ''  colour "  rhyme 
with  "  therefore,"  "  pleasure  "  with  errour," 
*'  service  "  with  "  wise,"  "  tune  "  with  "  for- 
tune," and  "  comfort  "  with  "  port,"  he  may 
not  be  straining  his  own  speech  ;  though  when 
we  find  "  Egypt  "  rhymed  with  "  writ  "  we 
know  a  foreign  influence  is  at  work  ;  and  in 
such  a  sequence  as  ''  troubelous,"  "  famous," 
and  "  glori6us  "  we  recognize  a  native  mal- 
practice which  was  continued  by  scholarly 
and  other  poets  down  to  the  end  of  the  century. 


POETRY  BEFORE   SPENSER       45 

But  in  many  cases  no  metrical  rules  will  avail 
to  make  Wyatt's  verse  scan.  In  Tottel's 
edition  we  are  tempted  to  effect  it  by  viola- 
tions of  accent ;  but  it  turns  out  that  Tottel 
has  been  "  improving  "  rather  than  spoiling 
Wyatt's  measures  ;  and  exact  transcriptions 
of  what  appear  to  be  authoritative  manu- 
scripts force  us  to  give  up  the  attempt. 
At  times,  indeed,  Tottel  misses  the  right 
accentuation,  as  in  the  epigram  beginning,  in 
his  version : 

The  enemy  of  life,  decayer  of  all  kind. 

Here  the  manuscript  shows,  as  we  might 
have  known  from  Surrey's  practice,  that 
Wyatt  gave  the  word  "  enemy  "  the  French 
pronunciation  "Th'  enn'mi."  As  regards  the 
translated  sonnets  and  the  earlier  epigrams 
in  general,  however,  there  is  small  satisfaction 
for  the  reader  who  reads  verse  metrically  ; 
and  we  seem  forced  to  the  conclusion  that 
in  his  earlier  work  Wyatt  had  no  metrical 
standards.  He  seems  to  have  read  Chaucer  in 
Pynson's  edition  of  1526,  in  which  the  old 
poet's  measures  are  reduced  to  mere  "  pie  "  for 
lack  of  good  texts  or,  as  is  probable,  through 
entire  ignorance  of  Chaucer's  metrical  rules. 
Out  of  that  text  no  one  could  extract  any 
regular  rhythm  ;  and  Wyatt  seems  to  have 
contentedly  done  without  any  till  he  took 
to  making  madrigals  and  experimented  in 
translating  some  of  the  terza  rima  satires  of 


46      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

the  Italian  poet  Luigi  Alamanni.  Even  in  the 
satires  he  is  irregular,  but  he  has  grasped  the 
idea  of  an  iambic  movement ;  and  in  some 
madrigals  written  about  the  same  tiine  he  at 
last  masters  metre,  notably  in  that  which 
ends : 

Now  cease,  my  lute :    this  is  the  last 
Labor  that  thou  and  I  shall  waste. 

And  ended  is  that  we  begun  ; 
Now  is  this  song  both  sung  and  past : 

My  lute  be  still,  for  I  have  done. 

In  the  lines  beginning  ''Tagus,  farewell," 
written  in  1539,  the  rhythm  is  equally  secure  ; 
and  in  the  Penitential  Psalms^  begun  about 
that  time  and  posthumously  published  (1549), 
he  achieved  what  is  technically  his  most 
interesting  performance,  an  English  approxi- 
mation to  the  liquid  movement  of  Italian 
verse,  hardly  again  attempted  in  English 
poetry  till  the  nineteenth  century.  And  this, 
like  so  much  of  Wyatt's  work,  is  no  expression 
of  personal  feeling,  but  a  translation  or  ver- 
sion of  Pietro  Aretino's  prose  paraphrase  of 
the  Penitential  Psalms — the  literary  exercise 
of  one  of  the  least  devotional  of  Italian  men 
of  letters. 

Thus  we  reach  the  curious  paradox  that  the 
stream  of  modern  English  poetry  takes  its 
rise  with  a  man  of  affairs  who  for  years  wrote 
poetry,  mostly  translated  from  the  Italian, 
without  attempting  to  produce  either  English 
or  Italian  measure ;   then  gradually  realized, 


POETRY  BEFORE   SPENSER       47 

with  Italian  help,  how  verse  should  be  written  ; 
and  practically  ended  with  exercises  in  ac- 
centual rhythm  on  Italian  lines.  In  this 
fashion  did  Wyatt  compete  with  Sternhold 
and  Hopkins : 

My  flesh  is  troubled,  my  heart  doth  fear  the  spear ; 

The  dread  of  death,  of  death  that  ever  lasts, 
Threateth  of  right,  and  draweth  near  and  near. 

Much  more,  my  soul  is  troubled  by  the  blasts 
Of  these  assaults  that  come  as  thick  as  hail 
Of  worldly  vanity,  that  temptation  casts 

Against  the  weak  bulwark  of  the  flesh  frail 

Wherein  the  soul  in  great  perplexity 
Feleth  the  senses,  with  them  that  assail. 

But  it  was  not  through  his  version  of 
Aretino's  paraphrase  of  the  Psalms  that 
Wyatt  was  to  become  a  force  in  English 
poetry :  it  was  through  his  miscellaneous 
verse,  reproduced  and  partly  trimmed  by 
Tottel ;  a  ad  above  all  by  his  stimulating 
influence  on  the  young  Earl  of  Surrey. 

That  ill-starred  noble  is  perceptibly  a  man 
of  genius.  In  his  heedless  youth  he  was, 
with  other  roysterers,  capable  of  making 
midnight  war  on  the  windows  of  London 
citizens  with  "  stone-bows,"  otherwise  cata- 
pults ;  and  then  of  justifying  himself  in  a 
versified  declaration  that  he  had  been  moved 
to  that  course  by  his  resentment  of  the 
burghers'  vices.  When  he  came  to  his  end 
on  the  block  (1547)  at  thirty,  by  a  monstrous 


48      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

sentence  upon  an  absurd  charge  of  treason, 
ratified  by  the  warrant  of  the  dying  old 
king,  the  London  burghers  and  his  country- 
men generally  forgave  him  ;  and  in  a  later 
day  they  took  his  poetry  to  their  hearts.  It 
was  with  an  Italianate  sonnet  of  his  that 
Wyatt's  Psalms  came  out  two  years  later ; 
and  the  fact  that  both  poets  lay  marked  stress 
on  the  subject  of  sinful  old  kings  raises  a 
speculation  as  to  whether  a  perusal  by  Henry 
of  Surrey's  sonnet  had  anything  to  do  with 
his  indictment  and  execution. 

Eager  in  all  things,  Surrey  had  been  the 
warm  disciple  and  panegyrist  of  Wyatt,  in 
whose  verse  he  evidently  found  a  psychic 
interest  not  presented  to  him  by  previous 
English  poetry.  It  came,  of  course,  from  the 
Italian.  The  abundance  of  violent  life  which 
had  filled  the  fifteenth  century,  and  which  had 
been  renewed  in  the  later  years  of  Henry  VIII, 
was  not  yet  become  food  for  either  poetry  or 
adequate  prose.  Rather  it  would  seem  that 
violent  action  moves  the  actors  and  spectators 
to  seek  mental  relief  in  contrary  states,  and 
in  forms  of  art  which  call  up  another  order 
of  sensations.  Only  the  impact  of  foreign 
culture  made  notable  poets  of  Wyatt  and 
Surrey ;  and  only  in  an  age  of  comparative 
domestic  peace  was  their  legacy  to  become 
fruitful. 

Wyatt's  lead,  then,  was  skilfully  taken  up 
by   Sxirrey.     One   of  the   most   ungoverned 


POETRY  BEFORE  SPENSER   49 

men  of  his  time,  and  qualified  above  all 
things  to  make  enemies,  he  was  also  capable, 
as  his  praise  of  Wyatt  shows,  of  strong 
attachments,  and  of  framing  verse  by  rules 
_of  art.  If  we  can  trust  the  copies  preserved 
of  his  poems,  he  too  felt  himself  drawn  by 
differing  methods.  Much  more  often  than 
Wyatt  he  reverts  to  the  native  jigging  measure 
in  long  lines,  so  comrnonly  fatal  to  poetic 
elevation.  In  the  new  verse,  again,  as  did 
Spenser  later,  he  at  times  employs  the 
Chaucerian  scansion,  as  in 

The  nightes  chair  [or  car]  the  starres  about  doth  bring 

But  though  he  had  been  specially  schooled  in 
Italian  in  his  boyhood,  he  shows  much  less 
tendency  than  either  Wyatt  or  Douglas  to 
reflect  Italian  rhythm.  He  had  not,  like 
Wyatt,  travelled  in  Italy,  the  common  state- 
ment to  that  effect  being  a  myth.  On  the 
other  hand,  he  betrays  a  disposition  to  the 
perilous  course  of  *'  quantitative "  classic 
measures,  as  in  the  piece  beginning : 

Of  thy  life,  Thomas,  this  compass  well  mark. 
Not  aye  with  full  sails  the  high  seas  to  beat. 

It  may  be  taken  for  granted  that  both. 
Wyatt  and  Surrey,  for  whom  the  old  tune 
of  alternate  lines  of  twelve  and  fourteen 
syllables  was  the  only  regular  native  measure, 
were  disposed,  like  a  number  of  later  scholar- 
poets,  to  seek  a  less  primitive  music  in  various 
4 


50      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

semblances  of  classic  song ;  and  some  such 
craving  may  have  underlain  Wyatt's  early 
irregularities,  as  it  actually  did  lead  Surrey 
to  create  our  blank  verse.  But  even  that 
creation  was  in  advance  of  the  taste  of  the 
age ;  and  other  experiments  of  a  quasi- 
classical  order  were  mere  snares  for  an  im- 
mature art.  Not  till  our  own  time  have  any 
really  skilful  poets  set  themselves  to  give  to 
verse  in  general,  with  due  moderation,  the 
rhythmic  variety  which  Shakespeare  lent  to 
blank  verse,  and  of  which  sorne  touch  was 
early  found  essential  in  the  heroic  couplet. 
Verse  had  to  become  law-abiding,  as  of  old, 
before  it  could  be  free.  The  Scots  poet, 
Gawain  Douglas,  had  already,  after  compass- 
ing a  tolerably  regular  stanza  verse  in  his 
King  Hearty  penned  (1513)  a  translation  of 
Virgil's  ZEneid  in  heroic  couplets  marked  by 
a  constant  bent,  doubtless  under  Italian 
influence,  to  accentual  as  against  merely 
syllabic  metre.  But  though  Douglas  has 
many  a  strong  and  many  a  freshly  charming 
line,  he  also  was  too  far  from  mastery  of  his 
craft  to  set  up  a  new  standard,  even  if  his 
dialect  had  been  acceptable  to  or  legible  by 
Englishmen.  What  Surrey  might  have  done 
had  he  lived  long  enough  to  mellow  his  charac- 
ter may  be  guessed  from  some  of  the  poems 
in  which  he  diverged  from  common  modes  ; 
for  instance,  the  Complaint  of  the  maiden 
whose  lover  is  at  sea  : 


POETRY  BEFORE   SPENSER       51 

When  other  lovers  in  arms  across 

Rejoice  their  chief  delight, 
Drowned  in  tears,  to  mourn  my  loss, 

I  stand  the  bitter  night 
In  my  window,  where  I  may  see 
Before  the  winds  how  the  clouds  flee : 
Lo  !   what  mariner  love  hath  made  me  ! 

There  is  an  inwardness  of  feeling  as  well  as 
a  subtlety  of  music  here  that  will  not  easily 
be  found  in  English  poetry  of  that  century. 
Thus  gifted,  the  cousin  of  Anne  Boleyn, 
Lord  Rochford,  and  Catherine  Howard, 
witness  of  the  executions  of  all  three,  might 
with  time  have  produced  poetry  of  a  palpable 
greatness.  As  it  was,  he  ranked  in  his  day 
and  the  next  as  the  most  finished  and  graceful 
master  of  the  love  poem;  and  he  added  to 
that  the  more  memorable  achievement  of 
creating  English  blank  verse,  the  one  for- 
tunate imitation  of  classical  methods  of  which 
the  language  was  capable.  It  was  in  a  trans- 
lation of  the  second  and  fourth  books  of  the 
^neidy  posthumously  published  (1557)  like 
his  other  work,  that  he  rendered  the  service. 
It  is  hardly  possible,  in  view  of  his  Italian 
culture,  to  doubt  that  he  was  led  to  this 
experiment  by  those  already  made  in  Italy, 
which  had  further  been  copied  in  Spain,  in 
a  blank-verse  translation  of  the  Odyssey. 
But  Surrey's  experiment  is  quite  individual ; 
and  though  he  did  not  live  to  perfect  the  new 
instrument,  his  technique  at  its  best  was 
hardly  improved  upon  until,  when  the  form 


52      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

had  been  established  m  drama,  it  was  taken 
up  by  Shakespeare.  Surrey's  blank  verse  is 
emphatically  epic  and  Virgilian;  and  to  say 
this  is  to  credit  it  with  a  kind  of  beauty  not 
to  be  looked  for  in  dramatic  poetry.  The 
opening  lines  : 

They  whisted  all,  with  fixed  face  attent. 
When  prince  ^neas  from  the  royal  seat 
Thus  gan  to  speak.     O  Queen  !   it  is  thy  will 
I  should  renew  a  woe  cannot  be  told — 

sound  a  note  that  carries  down  to  Tennyson, 
who  is  visibly  a  student  of  the  initial  Master. 
Such  lines  as 

The  clamour  strake  up  to  the  golden  stars  .  .  . 

By  friendly  silence  of  the  quiet  moon.  .  7  ^ 

Searching,  all  wounded,  the  long  galleries   j*^^ 
And  the  void  courts.  .  .  . 

might  almost  have  been  his.  The  inevitable 
blemishes  of  the  beginner's  work  come  mostly 
of  undue  reliance  on  the  measure  of  "  quan- 
tity," and  too  dutiful  concern  for  a  regular 
caesura.  But  the  touch  is  often  uncertain; 
and  so  many  lines  fail  to  scan  properly  that 
conservative  taste  was  only  too  well  coun- 
tenanced in  resistance  to  the  new  form. 
Yet,  withal,  Surrey  at  the  very  outset  re- 
vealed resources  in  it  that  his  successors  were 
very  slow  to  realize  and  develop.  Sackville 
and  Norton  used  it  in  F  err  ex  and  Porrex  (1561) 
with  less  than  the  inventor's  skill,  failing  to 
realize  the  importance  of  the  varied  pause 


POETRY  BEFORE   SPENSER       53 

and  the  run-on  line ;  and  Thomas  Hughes's 
tragedy.  The  Misfortunes  of  Arthur  (1587), 
which  shows  no  influence  from  any  of  the  pro- 
fessional dramatists  who  about  that  time 
were  trying  the  form,  goes  back  to  Surrey 
rather  than  to  the  tragedy-writers  who  first 
followed  him.  So  far,  only  Spenser,  in  one 
youthful  experiment,  shows  any  faculty  for 
developing  the  new  form  in  non-dramatic 
poetry. 

Strange  to  say,  no  one  attempted  to  carry 
on  Surrey's  translation  of  Virgil  in  the  same 
verse-form.  Gawain  Douglas,  the  first  to 
achieve  a  complete  "  British "  translation, 
had  made  a  fierce  attack,  in  his  first  prologue, 
upon  the  patchwork,  translated  from  the 
French,  which  the  good  Caxton  had  given  out 
as  the  Book  of  Eneydos.    As  Douglas  protested : 

It  hes  na  thing  ado  therwith,  God  wait, 

Nor  na  mair  like  than  the  devill  and  sanct  Austyne  ; 

Have  he  na  thank  therfor,  but  lost  his  pyne, 

So  shamefully  that  story  did  pervert. 

I  red  his  werk  with  harnies  at  my  hert, 
adds  the  Bishop,  in  his  rhythmic  line, 

That  sic  ane  buik,  but  sentence  or  engyne,* 
Suld  be  intitulit  efter  the  poet  devyne. 

It  would  seem  as  if  what  he  called  the 

Sharp  [=  keen  or  fine]  sugurate  song  Virgiliane, 
So  wisely  wrought  with  never  a  word  in  vain, 

*  Without  judgment  (sententia)  or  genius. 


54      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

daunted  the  southrons,  most  of  whom 
no  doubt  met  Douglas's  attempt  with  the 
contemporary  form  of  the  "  Fools  rush  in  " 
maxim.  But  not  only  was  Surrey's  fragment 
left  untouched  ;  the  next  translator,  Thomas 
Phaer,  physician,  who  published  his  version 
of  the  first  seven  books  of  the  jEneid  in 
1558,  deliberately  reverted  to  the  "  four- 
teener,"  by  way,  as  he  declared,  of  vindicating 
the  English  language,  which  had  been  deemed 
incapable  of  high  poetic  effects.  That  is  to 
say,  he  defended  the  claims  of  the  vernacular 
in  a  metre  which  only  a  strong  poet,  as  Chap- 
man was  later  to  show,  could  raise  to  poetic 
distinction,  and  which  in  any  case  was  as 
unsuitable  to  Virgil  as  it  was  adaptable  to 
Homer.  Phaer's  translation  is  in  every  way 
inferior  to  Surrey's.     For  lines  like 

But  to  the  hills  and  wide  holts  when  they  came. 
From  the  rocks'  top  the  driven  savage  rose, 

we  have  such  lines  as 

Lo  there  again  where  Pallas  sits,  on  forts  and  castle- 
towers. 

With  Gorgon's  eyes  in  lightning  clouds  inclosed  grim 
she  lowers, 

which  Phaer  thought  "  a  more  clean  and 
compendious  order  of  metre  than  heretofore 
hath  been  accustomed."  It  was  possibly  the 
best  going  when  he  began  his  task  in  1555  ; 
but  in  TotteVs  Miscellany:,  apavt  from  Surrey 


POETRY  BEFORE  SPENSER   55 

and  Wyatt,  there  were  represented  many 
hands  capable  of  quite  regular  *'fourteeners." 
Nicholas  Grimald,  who  wrote  heroic  couplets, 
was  at  home  in  the  more  vernacular  line,  as 
thus : 

Now  flaming  Phebus  passing  through  his  heavenly 

region  high 
The  uttrest  Ethiopian  folk  with  fervent  beams  doth 

fry. 

It  was  doubtless  the  employment  of  the 
measure  (in  quatrain)  in  the  translation  of 
the  Psalms  by  Sternhold  and  Hopkins  that 
gave  it  or  reinforced  its  vogue,  and  so  brought 
about  the  completion  of  Phaer's  task  by 
other  hands.  He  lived  only  to  finish  the 
eighth  and  ninth  books,  dying  in  1558; 
whereafter  another  physician,  Thomas  Twine 
of  Lewes,  completed  the  task,  with  Maphaeus's 
supplemental  or  thirteenth  book  ;  the  whole 
being  published  in  1583,  and  thrice  reprinted 
down  to  1620.  Abraham  Fleming  did  the 
Georgics  and  Bucolics  in  an  Alexandrine  or 
twelve-syllabled  blank  verse  in  1589,  but 
that  was  no  better  than  Phaer  and  Twine ; 
and  Robert  Stanyhurst's  astonishing  version 
of  four  books  of  the  Mneid  into  what  he  called 
English  hexameters  (1583)  could  have  found 
serious  readers  only  in  Bedlam.  The  metre 
was  under-blamed  by  Thomas  Nashe  when 
he  described  it  as  a  "  foul,  lumbering,  bois- 
terous, wallowing  measure."     In  short,  there 


56      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

was  to  be  no  tolerable  English  translation  of 
the  whole  jEneid  until  Dryden's,  so  essen- 
tially un-Virgilian.  Surrey's  lead  had  on  that 
side  been  given  in  vain.  Barnabe  Googe, 
writing  about  1560,  praises  Douglas  as  hav- 
ing "  won  the  Ball  "  in  translating  Virgil,  and 
avows  that 

The  noble  Henry  Howard  once,  tnat  raught  [= reached] 

eternal  fame. 
With  mighty  style  did  bring  a  piece  of  Virgil's  work 

in  frame. 

But  he  extols  Phaer  as  having  transcended  all 
rivalry  in  his  unfinished  work,  which,  Googe 
predicted,  "  never  man  shall  end.'*  The  old 
measure,  thus  glorified,  was  employed  by 
Arthur  Golding  in  his  version  (1565)  of  Ovid's 
Metamorphoses^  which  had  the  fortune  to  be 
read  and  used  by  Shakespeare.  Golding,  who 
produced  a  multitude  of  prose  translations 
from  the  French  as  well  as  this,  is  justly  pro- 
nounced '^  on  the  whole  a  better  poet  and  a 
better  translator  than  Phaer";  and  it  was 
doubtless  he  rather  than  Phaer  who  encouraged 
Chapman  to  use  the  measure  in  translating 
the  Iliad. 

The  national  proclivity  to  the  long  line  of 
fourteen  syllables  is  further  seen  persisting  in 
the  Eglogs^  Epytaphes,  and  Sonettes  of  Googe 
(1563),  who  seems  literally  to  have  been 
forced  into  print  by  the  masterful  urgency 
of   admiring   friends.    By    the   accident   of 


POETRY  BEFORE   SPENSER       57 

large  type  and  a  narrow  page,  Googe's 
*'  fourteeners,"  here  as  in  his  translation  of 
the  Latin  Zodiacus  Vitce  of  an  ItaUan  poet, 
appear  in  quatrains  of  eight-  and  six-syllabled 
lines,  like  Sternhold  and  Hopkins's  version  of 
the  Psalms,  only  the  second  and  fourth  lines 
rhyming.  In  that  fashion  they  go  easily 
enough,  Googe  having  a  gift  of  fluency  ;  but 
he  cannot  resist  the  temptation  given  by  the 
metre  to  prolixity.  Only  here  and  there,  as 
in  his  longest  poem,  Cupido  Conquered,  does 
he  attain  a  naive  note  of  sheer  poetry.  As 
here,  before  a  line  of  sheer  doggerel  : 

Great  pleasure  had  I  there  to  bide  and  stare  upon  the 

spring. 
For  why  me  thought  it  did  surmount  all  other  kind  of 

thing. 

The  ten  tragedies  of  Seneca  were  rendered  in 
the  same  jingle  by  a  series  of  hands  from 
1560  onwards. 

Poetic  evolution  proceeded  by  way  of  profit 
from  the  new  ideal  of  regular  metre,  crudely 
realized  in  the  "  fourteener,"  and  it  was  again 
an  aristocrat  who  successfully  innovated. 
During  the  reign  of  Mary  a  young  English 
noble,  Thomas  Sackville,  afterwards  Lord 
Buckhurst  and  first  Earl  of  Dorset,  was 
moved  by  the  long  retrospect  of  turmoil  and 
tragedy  in  English  life  to  interest  himself  in 
a  plan  for  a  series  of  didactic  poems  setting 
forth  the  cases  of  the  more  eminent  victims. 


58      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

The  title  chosen  was  A  Mirrour  for  Magis- 
trates. Like  most  other  literary  enterprises 
of  the  age,  this  had  been  suggested  by  foreign 
example.  Boccaccio  had  produced.  (1360)  a 
Latin  history  Of  the  Falls  of  Illustrious  Men 
and  Women  (beginning  with  Adam  and  Eve) 
which  had  been  freely  translated  and  expanded 
in  French  ;  and  the  French  book  in  turn  had 
been  profusely  translated  by  the  monk  Lyd- 
gate  {circa  1430)  into  English  stanza  verse, 
under  the  title  of  The  Fall  of  Princes^  with 
small  acceptance.  For  English  edification, 
there  were  required  English  "  tragedies," 
as  such  simple  recitals  were  then  termed  ; 
and  Sackville  and  his  coadjutors  planned  an 
English  selection,  copying  Boccaccio's  alle- 
gorical and  dramatic  machinery.  Becoming 
an  active  diplomatist  and  statesman,  he  had 
to  leave  the  execution  of  the  main  body  of  the 
work  to  the  others  ;  and  in  due  course  there 
was  compiled  a  kind  of  rhymed  encyclopaedia 
of  tragic  historical  and  legendary  episodes, 
covering,  besides  the  legendary  period,  a 
hundred  and  fifty  years  of  British  history, 
down  to  the  latter  part  of  the  fifteenth  century. 
All  that  is  now  readable  with  any  zest  is 
Sackville's  own  Induction,  in  which,  sub- 
stituting the  figure  of  Sorrow  for  Boccaccio's 
Fortune,  the  poet  presents  himself  to  be  con- 
ducted by  that  guide  to  Avernus,  in  a  nar- 
rative recalling  sometimes  Virgil  and  some- 
times Dante.     At  once  we  are  conscious  of  an 


POETRY  BEFORE   SPENSER       59 

established  prosody.  Save  for  a  few  obsolete^ 
words  and  idioms,  Sackville's  is  the  modern^ 
English  speech  ;  and  his  lines  are  invariably 
regular.  The  Chaucerian  e  is  done  with,  once 
for  all ;  and  the  metre  sets  up  no  difficulty 
whatever.  The  seven-line  stanza  is  that  of 
Chaucer,  borrowed  from  the  Italian,  and  it 
is  managed  as  carefully  as  ever  his  was.  Sir 
Thomas  More  had  tried  it  in  his  youth,  in  a 
poem  which  may  have  suggested  Sackville's. 
As  to  the  poetry,  Sackville  is  not  exactly  in 
the  great  line  ;  but  he  has  true  poetic  feeling 
and  a  taste  in  diction  that  yields  at  times  a 
fine  sonority,  as  in  the  vision  of  Pluto's  realm  : 

Thence  came  we  to  the  horror  and  the  hell. 
The  large  great  kingdoms  and  the  dreadful  reign 
Of  Pluto  in  his  throne  where  he  did  dwell : 
The  wide  waste  places  and  the  hugy  plain. 

Reading  the  Induction,  one  has  a  surmise 
that  if  the  writer  could  have  left  allegory 
alone,  he  might  have  been  an  effective  poet  of 
nature  and  human  experience.  As  usual,  the 
allegory  turns  to  confusion  :  in  two  succes- 
sive stanzas,  of  really  high  quality,  Sleep  is 
respectively  concrete  and  abstract,  repellent 
in  the  first  form  and  attractive  in  the  second  : 

By  him  [Care]  lay  heavy  Sleep,  the  cousin  of  Death, 

Flat  on  the  ground,  and  still  as  any  stone, 

A  very  corpse,  save  yielding  forth  a  breath  ; 

Small  keep  [heed]  took  he,  whom  fortune  frowned  on. 

Or  whom  she  lifted  up  into  the  throne 

Of  high  renown;   but  as  a  living  death. 

So,  dead  alive,  of  life  he  drew  the  breath. 


60      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

The  body^s  rest,  the  quiet  of  the  heart. 

The  travail's  ease,  the  still  night's  fere  [comrade]  was  he 

And  of  our  life  in  earth  the  better  part  ; 

Keaver  of  sight,  and  yet  in  whom  we  see  . 

Things  oft  that  chance  and  oft  that  never  be ; 

Without  respect  esteemed  equally 

Eng  CrcBsus'  pomp  and  Irus'  poverty. 

But  when  we  have  passed  the  Induction  and 
met  the  grisly  ghost  of  Henry  Duke  of 
Buckingham  (the  tool  and  victim  of  Richard 
Crookback),  who  proceeds  to  deliver  his 
''  Complaint,"  we  are  soon  glad  to  go  back 
to  the  allegory.  The  narrative  business  is 
dismally  "  instructive  "  in  Sackville's  hands  ; 
and  in  the  succeeding  episodes,  by  various 
versifiers,  the  tedium  grows  insupportable. 
Baldwin,  the  most  diligent  contributor,  was 
an  ecclesiastic,  a  schoolmaster,  and  an  un- 
tiring compiler  of  lives,  sayings,  similes, 
proverbs,  and  moral  commonplaces,  to  one 
set  of  which  he  gave  the  title  of  A  Treatise 
of  Moral  Philosophy.  Of  philosophy  it  never 
comes  within  sight ;  yet  it  was  further  ex- 
panded by  a  kindred  spirit,  and  had  a  long 
and  possibly  useful  life  as  a  handbook  for 
serious  youth  and  age. 

This  kind  of  literature,  in  fact,  with  that 
of  devotion,  met  a  need  more  widely  felt  in 
the  sixteenth  century  than  any  craving  for 
poetry  in  the  modern  sense.  The  Mirrour^ 
which  was  first  published  in  1559,  reprinted 
in  1563,  1571,  and  1574,  and  extensively  eked 
out  ip   J  587  by  John  Higgins,   clergyman. 


POETRY  BEFORE  SPENSER   61 

schoolmaster,  and  lexicographer,  was  probably 
the  most  widely  read  mass  of  serious  secular 
verse  in  Elizabeth's  reign,  and  is  more  broadly 
characteristic  of  the  taste  of  the  time  than 
any  poetry  of  a  higher  kind.  A£art  from  Sid- 
ney and  Jonson,  most  men,  Spenser  included, 
were  agreed  that  the  main  end  of  poetry 
was  moral  edification  ;  and  here  the  moral 
end  was  as  squarely  faced  as  in  any  catechism. 
No  reader  of  the  Mirrour  could  be  accused, 
as  were  the  readers  of  the  Canterbury  Tales 
and  the  Morte  d^ Arthur  by  old  Roger  Ascham, 
of  battening  upon  impropriety.  In  those 
funereal  folios  vice  is  never  presented  save  for 
reprobation  and  condign  punishment :  the 
poetry  is  of  the  kind  that  Puritans  could  read 
without  a  qualm  of  conscience.  As  for  the 
implied  aim  of  regularizing  life  and  public 
polity,  that  was  as  far  promoted  as  good  ends 
ever  are  by  bad  homilies.  In  that  compara- 
tively peaceful  age,  men  had  come  to  read  of 
past  human  shipwrecks  with  a  sense  of  edifica- 
tion in  the  sheer  perusal ;  and  the  prevailing 
appetite,  which  partly  determined  the  poetic 
course  of  Spenser,  continued  to  be  ministered 
to  by  better  poets,  such  as  Daniel  and  Drayton, 
after  Elizabeth  had  passed  away. 

The  poetry  of  pleasure,  moral  and  other, 
to  some  extent  grew  up  alongside  the  litera- 
ture of  rhymed  information  and  instruction. 
Sackville,  perhaps  with  some  collaboration 
from  Thomas  Norton  (who  helped  Sternhold 


62      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

and  Hopkins  with  their  metrical  version  of 
the  Psalms),  produced  Gorboduc,  or  Ferrex 
and  Porrex  (1561),  the  first  regular  English 
tragedy,  a  work  as  resolutely  edificatory  as 
the  Mirrour.  But  the  drama  was  destined  to 
take  care  of  itself,  to  the  happier  end  of  enter- 
taining men  ;  and  the  Elizabethans  all  the 
while  somehow  came  by  "  Songs  and  Son- 
nets "  of  varying  merit.  Totters  Miscellany 
includes  some  pieces  that  can  still  sing 
for  us,  like  ancient  harpsichords  not  wholly 
mouldered  or  unstrung.  The  device  of 
breaking  up  "twelves"  and  ''fourteeners " 
into  quatrains  of  alternately  rhyming  lines, 
for  instance,  results  in  a  quaintly  charming 
pastoral  ballad,  Harpelus^  Complaint ;  a  good 
lover's  song.  Give  place  you  ladies^  and  begone ; 
and  the  odd  old  canticle  of  Lord  Vaux,  The 
Aged  Lover  renounceth  Love,  of  which  broken 
fragments  reappear  in  the  mouth  of  the  grave- 
digger  in  Hamlet. 

There  must  have  been  a  large  unpublished 
output  of  such  verse  in  the  early  Elizabethan 
years.  In  1575  and  1576,  one  writer,  George 
Gascoigne,  put  forth  the  accumulations  of  a 
motley  life  of  forty  years,  to  the  extent  of 
over  a  thousand  quarto  pages  of  verse  and 
prose.  Without  attaining  to  greatness  or 
special  charm  in  any  species,  he  typifies 
much  of  the  culture-life  of  upper-class  Eng- 
land in  his  day.  Educated  at  Cambridge, 
he  entered  Gray's  Inn,  and  committed  follies 


POETRY  BEFORE   SPENSER       63 

enough  to  cause  him,  by  one  account,  to  be 
disinherited  by  his  father,  Sir  John  Gascoigne. 
Yet  he  sat  in  Parhament  in  1557-8  and  1558-9. 
After  forfeiting  or  wasting  his  patrimony,  he 
married  a  wealthy  widow,  mother  of  the  minor 
poet  Nicholas  Breton,  and  stood  for  Mid- 
hurst  in  1572,  only  to  be  rejected,  on  the 
strength  of  documents  laid  before  the  Privy 
Council,  as  a  notoriously  bad  character,  a 
skulking  debtor,  a  ruffian,  and  an  atheist. 
Whatever  he  may  have  been,  he  was  not  the 
last ;  for  his  prose  work  includes  a  series  of 
fervidly  devotional  treatise&,  largely  borrowed, 
but^  all  strictly  orthodox.  He  called  himself 
a  soldier,  and  did  serve  in  the  Low  Countries, 
where,  as  at  home,  he  got  into  jail.  His 
literary  character  is  as  hard  to  whitewash  as 
his  social ;  for  his  collective  works  include 
a  licentious  tale,  on  Italian  lines,  which  is 
strongly  suspected  of  being  a  base  betrayal  of 
one  of  his  own  intrigues.  But  his  versatility 
remains  remarkable.  With  equal  facility  he 
turns  out  sonnets,  rhymed  moral  and  peni- 
tential discourses,  translations  of  comedy  and 
tragedy  from  the  Italian,  didactic  "  morality  " 
drama  and  immorality  romance  of  his  own, 
and  the  string  of  devotional  treatises  afore- 
said, all  marked  by  the  same  torrential  flow 
of  composition,  all  coherent,  all  grammatical, 
all  the  verse  correctly  scanned,  all  finally 
negligible.  As  a  poet  he  runs  chiefly  to  the 
old  "  twelves  "  and  "fourteener  "  lines,  leav- 


64      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

ing  the  latter  such  even  when,  Uke  others,  he 
divides  it  in  quatrains  rhyming  only  in  the 
second  and  fourth  lines  ;  but  he  tried  blank 
verse  in  his  satire,  The  Steel  Glass,  and  in 
his  collaborative  tragedy,  Jocasta,  professedly 
translated  from  Euripides,  but  really  from  a 
free  Italian  version,  founded  on  the  Latin. 
In  neither  does  he  handle  the  new  form  with 
any  technical  mastery,  the  line  being  nearly 
always  a  clause  in  itself.  His  facility  of  pro- 
duction is  illustrated  by  the  account  given 
of  five  poems  in  his  Flowers : 

And  thus  an  end  of  these  five  themes  admounting 
to  the  number  of  258  verses,  devised  riding  by  the 
way,  writing  none  of  them  until  he  came  at  the  end 
of  his  journey,  the  which  was  no  longer  than  one  day 
in  riding,  one  day  in  tarrying  with  his  friend,  and  the 
third  in  returning  to  Gray's  Inn  ;  and  therefore  called 
Gascoigne's  Memories. 

Not  thus  is  the  higher  poetry  producible. 
Gascoigne  was  simply  an  uncommonly  clever 
dilettante,  as  may  be  finally  gathered  from 
his  Certain  Notes  of  Instruction  concerning  the 
Making  of  Verse  or  Ryme  in  English^  written, 
with  his  invariable  facility,  at  the  request  of 
an  Italian  friend.  Therein  he  tells  how  any 
man  may  make  verses  of  any  sort,  especially 
the  alternate  twelve-and-fourteen,  happily 
labelled  by  him  "  poulter's  measure,  which 
giveth  twelve  for  one  dozen  and  fourteen  for 
another."  We  gather  from  his  remarks  on 
Chaucer's  verse  that  he  knew  nothing  of  its 


POETRY  BEFORE  SPENSER       65 

rule  of  the  sounded  final  "  e,"  since  he  claims 
that,  "  being  read  with  understanding,  the 
longest  verse  and  that  which  hath  most 
syllables  in  it,  will  fall  (to  the  ear)  correspon- 
dent unto  one  which  hath  fewest  syllables  in 
it."  That  is,  he  read  Chaucer  non-metrically, 
in  a  loose  accentual  rhythm,  as  a  friendly  poet 
might ;  though  his  own  verse  all  belongs  to 
the  modern  and  regular  order,  counting  by 
syllables. 

On  the  whole,  Gascoigne  is  a  thoroughly 
Elizabethan  figure,  alike  in  his  character 
and  his  work,  his  licence  and  his  piety,  his 
"  Italianate "  culture,  and  his  unflagging 
interest  in  literary  experiment.  He  knew 
nothing  very  well  (unless,  perhaps,  Italian) 
and  did  nothing  very  well ;  his  moralizing 
and  his  immoralism  were  doubtless  equally 
spontaneous ;  yet  he  helped  forward  both 
drama  and  poetry,  whatever  he  did  for  re- 
ligion ;  and  it  was  in  keeping  with  the  stand- 
ards of  the  time  that  after  his  early  death  in 
1577  he  should  be  credited  by  his  literary 
friend,  George  Whetstone,  with  a  "  well- 
employed  life  and  godly  end."  In  any  case, 
he  challenges  our  attention  in  that  he  was 
nearer  the  Elizabethan  average  than  better 
men  and  better  poets. 

Much  less  interest,  indeed,  attaches  to  the 
quite  decorous  work  of  such  men  as  Thomas 
Howell,  who  in  1581  published  a  collection  of 
short  poems  under  the  title  H.  His  Devises, 

5 


66      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

for  his  own  Exercise  nd  his  Friends'*  Plea- 
sure, ''  Exercise,"  we  feel,  is  the  right  word, 
whatever  may  have  been  the  response  of 
the  friends ;  for  there  is  barely  a  stanza  in 
the  book  that  suggests  anything  in  the  nature 
of  poetic  afflatus.  Any  one  fondly  disposed  to 
think  there  was  a  virtue  in  Elizabethan  life 
which  made  all  poets  lyrical  can  be  well 
disillusioned  by  a  perusal  of  this  collection  of 
laboured  trifles.  By  some  inexplicable  acci- 
dent he  has  contrived  a  stanza  or  two  of  pure 
poetry  in  a  didactic  piece  otherwise  remark- 
able only  for  conscientious  carpentry.  As 
thus : 

I  doubt  the  Dryades 

Amidst  the  forest  chace. 
And  thinking  on  the  Seas 

I  dread  the  Mermaid's  grace. 

Apart  from  that  one  flower,  the  book  is  a 
mere  hortus  siccus  or  collection  of  clipped 
yews  and  boxes,  provocative  of  speculation 
as  to  the  reaction  of  taste  in  costume  upon 
taste  in  literature. 


CHAPTER    IV 

SPENSER 

A  CLEAR  psychological  conception  of  "  the 
poet "  will  hardly  be  attained  by  way  of  a 
study  of  the  chief  English  singer  of  the  six- 
teenth century.     If  we  were  to  outline  his 


SPENSER  67 

career  as  men  do  that  of  one  whom  they 
antagonize,  we  should  describe  Edmund 
Spenser  as  occupying  the  earlier  part  of  his 
mature  Hfe  in  seeking  his  fortune  at  Court, 
producing  poetry  by  the  way  ;  and  the  latter 
part,  spent  in  Ireland,  in  the  production  of 
a  voluminous  ethical  allegory  while  he  lived 
a  life  wholly  alien  and  hostile  to  that  around 
him,  upon  which  he  had  been  imposed  by  a 
Crown  gift  of  confiscated  land,  llis  great 
poem  began  to  appear  in  the  year  after  the 
Armada;  aH3Ttn5eIongs  alike  in  spirit  and 
m  idea  to  the  fabulous  age  of  chivalry.  He 
is  no  harmonizer  of  life  :  as  little  is  he  an 
interpreter  of  it.  But  to  see  this  is  only  to 
realize  once  more  that  a  poet  is  something 
else  than  a  prophet,  an  artist  other  than  a 
philosopher.  Spenser,  for  his  age  a  teacher, 
is  for  us  first  and  last  a  maker  of  the  music 
of  words,  a  creator  of  rhythmical  and  phrase- 
ological beauty  ;andll  is  m  virtue  of  that 
faculty  that  Ke  has  retained  through  three 
poetic  eras  the  status  of  ''  the  poets'  poet." 

In  English  literature,  he  begins  the  great 
line  of  the  university  poets.  A  poor  man's 
son,  helped  by  others  to  his  schooling,  he  was 
from  his  earliest  London  days  bookish  ;  and 
at  the  age  of  sixteen  or  seventeen  (if  we  can 
be  at  all  sure  about  the  merely  inferred  year 
of  his  birth)  we  find  him  contributing  transla* 
tions  from  the  French  to  a  composite  volume. 
The  Theatre  of  Worldlings  (1569),  published  in 


68      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

an  English  translation  for  one  Vander  Noodt, 
a  Flemish  refugee.  The  compiler  professes 
to  have  translated  from  the  Dutch  and 
Flemish  two  "  sonnet "  series  taken  from 
Du  Bellay  and  from  Marot's  rendering  of 
Petrarch,  which  are  substantially  identical 
with  the  two  versions  later  published  by  or 
for  Spenser,  in  his  miscellaneous  volume  of 
1590,  the  latter  as  "  formerly  translated." 
The  mystification  is  not  yet  wholly  cleared 
up  ;  but  it  is  obvious  that  the  verse  transla- 
tions are  by  an  English  hand  ;  and  as  Vander 
Noodt  seems  to  have  been  his  friend,  it  can 
hardly  be  doubted  that  they  are  really  by 
the  young  Spenser,  who  in  the  year  of  their 
issue  entered  Cambridge  University.  He  was 
thus  already  something  of  a  linguist  (unless, 
indeed,  Vander  Noodt  had  given  him  prose 
versions  to  versify) ;  and  no  less  remarkable 
is  the  fact  that  the  translation  later  called 
The  Visions  of  Bellay,  which  in  1590  has  been 
put  in  rhyme,  appears  in  the  first  form  in 
fluid  and  limpid  blank  verse — necessarily 
primitive  as  regards  its  "  end-stopped " 
structure,  as  was  most  English  blank  verse 
before  Shakespeare,  but  fresh,  fluent,  and 
really  flawless  ;  the  "  irregular  "  lines  being 
in  fact  forerunners  of  our  most  modern 
rhythmical  innovations.  About  his  seven- 
teenth year  Spenser  had  written  some  of  the 
best  English  blank  verse  yet  produced. 
The  process  of  his  formation,  only  slightly 


SPENSER  69 

to  be  traced  in  biographic  record,  is  to  be 
divined  from  the  beginnings.  All  his  studies 
he  tended  to  "  turn  to  favour  and  to  pretti- 
ness."  He  spent  a  number  of  years  in  "  the 
north " — somewhere  about  Pendle  Hill,  on 
the  borders  of  Lancashire  and  Yorkshire. 
And  if  we  are  to  conclude  that  the  rustic 
diction  which  fills  the  Shepherd's  Calendar 
and  colours  the  Faerie  Queene  was  a  dialect 
there  spoken,  we  are  left  with  the  puzzling 
inference  that  Lancashire  or  Yorkshire  folk 
in  those  days  used  a  dialect  that  was  in  large 
part  identical  with  Lowland  Scots,  for  only 
in  Scots  are  many  of  his  words  latterly  cur- 
rent. Courting,  studying,  mixing  with  rustic 
life,  or  seeking  secretarial  occupation  or  Court 
patronage,  conning  alternately  Chaucer  and 
the  classics,  and  the  French  and  the  Italians, 
planning  some  poems  never  written  and  pen- 
ning a  number  now  lost,  he  must  have  been 
perpetually  experimenting.  Under  the  influ- 
ence of  his  friend,  Gabriel  Harvey,  at  college 
and  later,  he  produced  strange  shapes  of 
pseudo-classic  rhythm,  norms  incapabie  of 
survival  in  English,  while  he  made  no  further 
attempt  in  the  sound  form  of  blank  verse. 
But  his  hold  on  or  love  for  Chaucer  and 
archaic  English  saved  him  from  going  far  in 
the  blind  alley  of  pedantry. 

On  the  other  hand  his  archaism  and  rusti- 
cism,  the  instinctive  resort  of  so  many  poets 
since,   and   the   natural   device   of  sensitive 


70      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

spirits  conscious  of  the  prosaic  air  of  the 
present,  served  to  win  him  the  favour  of 
readers  similarly  minded,  at  some  cost  of 
masculine  strength.  To  turn  from  Spenser, 
either  to  the  objective  verse  of  Marlowe  or 
Shakespeare  or  to  the  later  subjective  verse 
of  Jonson  or  Chapman  or  Donne,  is  to  realize 
that  the  more  virile  natures  perforce  took 
another  way.  They  are  signally  modern  by 
contrast.  Spenser,  with  all  his  originality, 
is  artistically  atavistic,  both  in  form  and  sub- 
stance. But  that,  after  all,  is  for  the  given 
artist  the  way  of  being  himself  ;  and  Spenser's 
power  is  in  its  own  kind  as  rare  as  any. 

His  artistic  greatness  becomes  clear  as  soon 
as  we  note  his  public  emergence  ten  years  after 
his  precocious  start.  At  the  date  of  the 
publication  of  the  Shepherd^s  Calendar  (1579), 
Elizabethan  verse  had  at  no  point  excelled 
the  legacy  of  Surrey  and  Wyatt.  Neither  in 
satire  nor  in  lyric  had  Gascoigne  transcended 
their  inspiration  ;  and  a  contempt  for  poetry 
as  a  form  of  trifling  was  still  perhaps  the  ruling 
sentiment  among  men  of  the  world.  That 
way  of  thinking  doubtless  persisted ;  but 
thenceforth  the  lovers  of  verse  had  justifica- 
tion for  their  faith.  The  Calendar  might  be 
compared  with  the  concert  performance  of 
a  modern  virtuoso  in  music  :  it  reveals  at 
once  the  highest  reach  of  executive  faculty 
in  the  widest  range  of  artistic  forms  that 
Englishmen  had  yet  seen  in  their  own  Ian- 


SPENSER  71 

guage.  Only  a  born  and  trained  master 
of  verse  could  have  achieved  such  vigour 
with  such  melody  of  utterance ;  such  ease 
in  a  dozen  styles ;  such  expert  facility  in 
transjBgured  folk-song  along  with  such  evi- 
dent scholarly  accomplishment.  Here  again 
Spenser  was  following  the  French  lead  of 
Marot,  two  of  the  eclogues  being  paraphrases 
from  him  ;  but  the  pupil  is  himself  grown  a 
master.  Sidney,  half  true  poet,  half  artistic 
dilettante,  might  balk  at  the  archaism  and  the 
rusticism ;  but  for  him  and  for  all  the  cul- 
tured youth  of  England  here  was  no  addi- 
tional dilettante  but  a  new  master,  to  whom 
hats  must  be  lifted. 

The  mark  of  many-sidedness,  of  variety  of 
art  and  of  interest,  is  upon  all  the  rest  of 
Spenser's  miscellaneous  poetry,  ranging  as  it 
does  from  the  satirical  and  topical  verse  of 
Mother  Hubbard's  Tale  and  Colin  Cloufs 
Come  Home  Again  to  the  andante  music  of 
the  Epithalamion  and  the  high  soprano  flight 
of  the  Four  Hymns^  youthful  performances 
inspired  by  Plato.  Not  till  the  nineteenth 
century  was  there  to  come  another  poet  with 
such  diversity  of  theme  and  power. 

It  may  be,  indeed,  that  Spenser  pays  the 
penalty  of  many-sidedness  and  fecundity  in 
a  failure  to  reach  the  topmost  height  of  excel- 
lence in  any  one  whole  poem :  that  he  com- 
pares rather  with  the  multiform  and  motley 
exuberance    of    Browning    than    with    the 


72      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

finished  perfection  of  the  master-songs  of 
Milton  and  Tennyson.  Even  the  Epithala- 
mion  will  not  bear  the  full  weight  of  praise 
that  has  been  heaped  upon  it :   such- a  line  as 

Those  trouts  and  pikes  all  others  do  excell 

tells  of  a  failure  either  of  inspiration  or  of 
judgment ;  and  there  are  other  items  of 
padding.  But  all  this  does  not  affect  the 
conclusion  that  Spenser  is  the  first  great 
master  in  modern  English  poetry ;  that  his 
artistic  endowment  is  of  the  rarest  fulness ; 
and  that  he  marks  and  opens  an  era.  No- 
thing comparable  to  the  Epithalamion  and 
the  Prothalamion  for  sheer  variety  of  melody 
and  wealth  of  charm  had  ever  before  appeared 
in  English,  or  was  to  appear  for  many  a  day 
after.  Tried  by  the  standard  of  previous 
achievement,  Spenser  is  simply  alone  :  there 
is  no  rival.  His  shorter  pieces  constitute  a 
new  kind  of  poem  and  new  kinds  of  beauty ; 
and  his  magnum  opus,  which  is  not  thus  unique, 
is  none  the  less  above  contemporary  rivalry. 
With  the  appearance  of  the  first  three  cantos 
of  the  Faerie  Queene  there  is  bestowed  upon 
modern  English  literature  something  lost  since 
Chaucer's  day,  the  franchise  of  the  historic 
kingdom  of  civilized  song,  reaching  from 
Homer  down  the  ages.  The  mere  power  to 
produce  without  limit  continuous  and  canor- 
ous verse,  as  perfectly  ordered  in  its  own 
fashion  as  that  of  any  other  language,  stood 


SPENSER  73 

for  something  more  than  the  moral  content 
of  the  poem.  That,  indeed,  tells  clearly- 
enough  of  mental  immaturity,  alike  in  its 
obtrusiveness  and  in  its  inadequacy.  But, 
save  for  the  sombre  stanza-poetry  of  Sack- 
ville,  English  metric  art  had  not  latterly 
revealed  any  capacity  to  compete  with  such 
European  masters  as  Ariosto  and  Tasso.  It 
was  in  the  apprentice  stage,  occupied  with 
minor  tasks  such  as  Spenser  himself  had 
transcended  once  for  all  in  his  Calendar, 
Tutored  by  the  Italian  epic-makers,  and  in 
especial  by  Ariosto — without  whose  example, 
and  that  of  Tasso,  his  great  poem  would  never 
have  been  written — he  now  essays  their  larger 
art,  passing  from  folk-song,  as  it  were,  to 
symphony.  A  living  poet  has  vividly  de- 
scribed the  magical  advance  of  Shakespeare 
on  his  greatest  predecessor  as  a  substitution 
for  "  gong  and  cymbals'  din  "  of 

The  continuity,  the  long  slow  s'opo 
And  vast  curve  of  the  gradual  vioiin. 

With  perhaps  no  more  qualification  than  is 
strictly  called  for  in  the  case  p^'t,  the  same 
may  be  said  of  Spenser's  advance  upon  his 
predecessors  in  rhymed  ver-^e.  His  mere 
stanza  is  admittedly  a  new  felic'ty,  the  long 
closing  line  having  an  incalculable  melodic 
value ;  and  his  gift  of  lovely  phrase  at  once 
electrified  his  fellow-craftsmen,  as  it  has  de- 
lighted song-lovers  ever  since. 


74      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

It  is  too  true  that  all  this  new  wealth  of 
beauty  is  in  part  countervailed  by  artistic 
blemishes  of  the  most  grievous  kind.  The  art 
of  Spenser  is  no  less  of  a  paradox  than  his 
character,  his  life.  When,  seeking  to  know 
the  man,  we  scan  closely  his  prose  View  of  the 
Present  State  of  Ireland,  we  find  ourselves  look- 
ing through  eyes  clear  and  hard  as  glass,  a 
personality  as  narrow  and  ungenial  as  that 
of  any  Spanish  conquistador  of  the  age.  The 
"  cold  "  Bacon,  in  this  regard,  shows  by  far 
the  wider  vision,  the  warmer  touch  of  what 
we  should  call  either  poetic  or  statesmanlike 
sympathy.  Spenser  was  as  far  from  the 
humanism  of  Whitman  or  even  of  Tennyson 
as  the  Lord  Grey  of  his  day  was  from  that 
of  the  Sir  George  Grey  of  ours.  We  feel 
that,  with  all  his  antiquarian  outlook,  his  re- 
lation to  the  Irish  folk  around  him  was  rather 
that  of  a  later  American  frontiersman  to 
a  Comanche,  or  of  a  Massachusetts  Piu-itan  to 
a  Pequod.  And  in  his  work  he  is  just  as 
duplex.  In  the  Faerie  Queene,  the  master 
of  the  lovely  line  and  the  exquisite  phrase 
outgoes  the  popular  dramatists  in  his  resort 
to  images  of  nastiness ;  and  with  all  his 
moralizing  his  imagination  is  often  gratuit- 
ously gross.  It  has  been  said  of  him,  with 
strict  truth,  that  for  purposes  of  reading 
aloud  in  a  mixed  company,  Spenser's  chief 
poem  would  require  far  more  excision  than 
would  that   of  Ariosto.     To  saint  him  for 


SPENSER  75 

"  purity "  because  of  his  Puritan  tone  and 
tactic  is  either  to  garble  or  to  overlook  much 
of  his  matter.  The  mere  nauseousness  of 
much  of  his  imagery  must  set  a  sensitive 
modern  reader  chronically  thinking  of  disin- 
fectants. 

Once  for  all,  we  must  realize  that  we  are 
dealing  with  a  poet,  and  a  poet  of  the  English 
Renaissance  at  that ;  not  with  a  thinker.  He 
is  an  artist  in  words  in  an  age  of  foul  smells 
and  much  foul  talk.  Spenser's  poetry,  at 
least  in  the  bulk  of  the  Faerie  Queene,  is  in 
no  sense  *'  philosophical."  His  Four  Hymns^ 
wherein  he  makes  his  chief  effort  of  a  philo- 
sophic kind,  are  but  youthful  paraphrases 
of  Plato.  Philosophy  was  in  fact  not  yet 
become  an  English  study ;  and  Spenser  had 
no  original  power  of  that  kind.  In  his  great 
poem,  for  sheer  lack  of  abstract  thinking 
power,  he  multiplies  crudities  of  allegory 
which  alternately  suggest  charades  and  bur- 
lesque— as  when,  in  the  second  book,  Guyon 
wrestles  with  Furor  and  has  to  tie  up  Occasion 
in  order  to  succeed.  It  is  no  use  to  say  with 
Hazlitt  that  the  allegory  will  not  bite  us.  It 
does,  persistently,  as  if  the  poet  felt  that  we 
had  thus  to  be  kept  awake.  Having  ex- 
hausted one  allegorical  thesis  he  turns  his 
figures  to  some  other  thesis,  making  Duessa 
now  Queen  Mary,  now  the  Church  of  Rome.   ' 

All  the  while  he  shows  no  real  allegorical 
gift.     The    whole    theorem    of    the    Blatant 


76   ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Beast  as  =  popular  calumny  is  frigid  median- 
.ism.  Strangely  enough,  the  mystic  poet  can 
hardly  ever  suggest  moral  evil  save  by  the 
physically  disgusting,  outgoing  as  he  does 
the  horrors  of  Dante's  hell  by  his  laboured 
.•pictures  of  the  merely  beastly.  Here  he  fol- 
lowed the  lead  of  Ariosto,  but  with  far  more 
resort  to  crudely  materialistic  devices.  It  is 
an  error  of  minimization  to  speak  of  "  the 
Blatant  Beast  "  in  the  Faerie  Queene.  There 
are  half  a  dozen  beasts  in  the  story,  all  of  the 
same  brand. 

All  this  was  part  of  the  penalty  of  adher- 
ence to  the  medieval  device  of  allegory  and 
the  Italian  machinery  of  knights-errant, 
dragons,  enchanters,  and  enchantresses.  As 
the  knights  had  to  be  brave,  the  witches  had 
to  be  fundamentally  vile,  and  the  dragons 
loathsome.  In  Spenser's  case  the  syncretic 
result  is  a  long  poem  without  unity,  an  eked- 
out  string  of  similar  episodes  without  vital 
connexion,  a  procession  of  personages  dis- 
tinguishable only  as  good  and  bad,  fair  and 
foul,  brave  and  craven.  His  imitations  of 
the  female  warriors  of  Ariosto  and  Tasso  are 
at  least  as  unconvincing  as  the  originals ; 
and  his  moral  lessons  are  no  more  impressive 
*  than  theirs.  It  was  the  aesthetic  fallacy  of 
that  age  to  hold  by  the  didactic  view  of  all 
art ;  and  to  think  that  all  shortcomings  in 
workmanship  were  salved  by  an  obtrusive 
moral  commentary.      Harington,  translating 


SPENSER  77 

and  commenting  Ariosto  (1591)  and  Fairfax, 
translating  and  introducing  Tasso  (1600), 
clang  moral  symbols  and  rattle  mechanisms 
of  allegory  that  might  conceivably  serve  to 
scare  off  all  save  celibate  pedagogues.  All 
round,  the  pseudo-historical  personages  are 
much  less  recognizably  human  than  the  Zeus 
and  Hera  of  Homer,  or  the  Satan  of  Milton : 
the  portrayal  of  discernible  characters  was 
to  come  in  only  with  the  new  English  drama. 
Spenser  was  too  fanatically  malicious  to  make 
of  Mary  Queen  of  Scots  anything  but  a  loathly 
sorceress ;  and  his  ideal  knights  may  as  well 
be  identified  with  any  one  Elizabethan  as 
with  any  other,  since  they  portray  none.  It 
is  a  decisive  testimony  to  his  power  in  other 
regards  that  his  pageant  of  unrealities  could 
go  on  attracting  readers  alongside  of  the 
living  "  pell-mell  of  Shakespeare's  men  and 
women." 

And  still  we  return  to  Spenser  as  to  the 
gracious  colour-work  of  Old  Masters  whose 
picture-themes  have  ceased  to  concern  us. 
His  art,  it  is  true,  incurs  risks  from  which 
theirs  is  exempt.  The  specific  sin  of  the  art 
of  words  is  verbiage;  and  Spenser's  stanza 
sins  in  that  kind  with  a  heedlessness  hard  to 
forgive.  The  great  poem  often  suggests  a 
dredging  machine  which  with  equal  facility 
pours  forth  gold,  diamonds,  and  mud,  as 
being  bound  to  keep  going,  whatever  be  the 
material  forthcoming.     No  other  great  poet 


78      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

has  produced  so  many  lines  of  doggerel, 
so  much  unashamed  line-padding.  All  that 
must  just  be  accepted  as  a  by-product  of  the 
gold  and  the  gems.  It  cannot  be  that  he  did 
not  realize  the  varying  quality  of  his  output. 
Four  times  over,  in  different  works,  he  new- 
minted  the  lines : 

Upon  her  eyelids  many  graces  sate 
Under  the  shadow  of  her  even  brows. 

When  he  wrote : 

And  ever  and  anon  the  rosy  red 
Flashed  through  her  face 

{F.  Q.  Ill,  ii,  6), 

he  was  but  hitting  the  best  of  several  phrases, 
of  which  one  runs : 

And  ever  and  anon  with  rosy  red 
The  bashful  blood  her  snowy  cheeks  did  dye 

(n,ix,  41). 

He  loved  thus  to  jewel  his  long-drawn  tapestry 
with  pearls  great  and  small.  We  seem  to 
see  him  looking  up  at  his  audience  for  their 
approving  glance,  joying  in  his  melody. 
And  where  he  did  not  repeat,  others  did  for 
him.  Instantly  after  the  issue  of  the  first 
three  cantos,  Marlowe  in  the  printed  Tambur- 
laine  chants  over  again  the  melody  of  the 
lines : 

Like  to  an  almond-tree  ymounted  high 
On  top  of  green  Selinis  all  alone. 


SPENSER  79 

With  blossoms  brave  bedecked  daintily  ; 
Whose  tender  locks  do  tremble  every  one 
At  every  little  breath  that  under  heaven  is  blown 

{F.  Q.  I,  vii,  32). 

Peele   in   David  and  Beihsdbe  repeats   with 
hardly  a  change  the  dancing  carol : 

At  last,  the  golden  Oriental  gate 
Of  greatest  heaven  'gan  to  open  fair, 

And  Phoebus,  fresh  as  bridegroom  to  his  mate. 
Came  dancing  forth,  shaking  his  dewy  hair. 
And  hurled  his  glistring  beams  through  gloomy  air. 

(^.g.I,v,2). 

And  Greene  or  Peele  in  Locrine^  and  Greene 
or  Marlowe  in  Selimus — ^two  early  plays  of 
the  Marlowe  school — echo  a  number  of  lines, 
passages,  and  phrases.  The  inspirer  of  all 
this  chorus  knew  as  well  as  any  one  when  he 
had  written  beautifully :  he  must  have  been 
nearly  as  well  aware  when  he  produced  rela- 
tive commonplace  and  padding.  We  can  but  * 
infer  that  for  Spenser  the  didactic  view  of 
poetry  served  as  an  anaesthetic  to  the  artistic  ' 
sense.  To  regard  the  main  aim  of  a  poem 
as  moral  instruction  was  to  conceive  of  beauty 
of  workmanship  as  an  embellishment  rather 
than  an  essential.  In  the  View  of  the  Present 
State  of  Ireland^  Spenser's  own  representative 
in  the  dialogue  speaks  of  having  had  some  of 
the  native  poems  translated  for  him,  and  pro- 
nounces that  "  surely  they  savoured  of  sweet 
wit  and  good  invention  ;  but  skilled  not  of 
the  goodly  ornaments  of  poetry ;    yet  were 


80      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

they  sprinkled  with  some  pretty  flowers  of 
their  own  natural  device."  Evidently  he 
would  not  have  assented  to  Arnold's  view  of 
poetry  as  something  to  be  evolved  in  the 
sheer  exposition  of  a  great  theme  or  action  : 
it  was  for  him  rather  a  jewelling  of  the  text. 
Such  a  conception  of  his  art  permitted  of 
much  prosaic  statement  and  diffuse  diction 
to  which  "  ornament "  was  to  be  a  relief. 
What  can  always  be  counted  on  in  Spenser 
is  fluency  and  perfect  scansion  :  dignity  of 
purport  and  diction  is  in  comparison  pre- 
carious. But  in  one  respect  Spenser  is  almost 
unfailingly  poetical.  His  prevailing  bias  is 
to  the  elegiac  :  '[  sad  '^  is  his  favourite  adjec- 
tive ;  and  at  well  nigh  every  opportunity  he 
raises  reverie  to  a  grave  music.  His  poetry 
thus  resembles  in  its  effects  those  of  the  pre- 
Wagnerian  forms  of  opera  in  which  much  of 
the  progress  of  the  action  was  made  in 
largely  uninspired  recitative,  which  rose  from 
time  to  time  into  tuneful  aria.  For  instance, 
in  the  first  canto  of  the  fourth  book,  resuming 
the  interrupted  task,  we  set  out  in  rather 
unpromising  fashion  with  the  customary  cap- 
tive maiden  and  fighting  virgin  and  "  jolly 
knight " ;  and  in  due  course  the  rescued 
maid  and  the  rescuer  meet  two  knights 
accompanied  by  the  false  Duessa  and  Ate, 
in  whom, 

Under  mask  of  beauty  and  good  grace. 
Vile  treason  and  foul  falsehood  hidden  were. 


SPENSER  81 

Then  comes  the  description  of  the  home  of 
At6,  "  mother  of  debate,"  and  out  of  the 
pedestrian  pace  of  the  narrative  the  aria 
rises,  pure  and  fine  : 

And  all  within,  the  riven  walls  were  hung 
With  ragged  monuments  of  times  forepast. 
All  which  the  sad  effects  of  discord  sung : 
There  were  rent  robes  and  broken  sceptres  placed, 
Altars  defiled,  and  holy  things  defaced  ; 
Disshivered  spears,  and  shields  ytom  in  twain  ; 
Great  cities  ransackt,  and  strong  castles  rased  ; 
Nations  captived,  and  huge  armies  slain  : 
Of  all  which  ruins  there  some  relics  did  remain. 

There  was  the  sign  of  antique  Babylon  ; 
Of  fatal  Thebes  ;    of  Rome  that  reigned  long  ; 
Of  sacred  Salem  ;    and  sad  Ilion, 
For  memory  of  which  on  high  there  hong 
The  Golden  Apple,  cause  of  all  their  wrong. 
For  which  the  three  fair  Goddesses  did  strive : 
There  also  was  the  name  of  Nimrod  strong. 
Of  Alexander,  and  his  princes  five 
Which  shar'd  to  them  the  spoils  that  he  had  got 
alive. 

Lingeringly  the  strain  dwells  on  "^Id^  Jin-, 
happy  far-olf  things,"  recalHng  the  themes 
of  the  poet's  earlier  translations  from  Bellay, 
and  musically  delaying  the  inevitable  moral 
lesson  and  the  unpleasant  picture  ;  till  through 
these  we  revert  to  the  ding-dong  of  the  com- 
bating knights,  banging  spear  on  shield,  and 
the  wonted  machinery  of  hags  and  enchant- 
resses. 

It  is  for  these  springing  fountains  of  song 


82      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

in  the  wilderness  of  allegory  that  we  roam 
with  Spenser's  wandering  knights  and  squires 
and  maidens  through  "  antres  vast  and 
deserts  idL,"  with  tneir  ever-renewed  mirage 
of  symbolism.  At  the  close,  after  an  eager 
return  to  his  old  pastoral  plane,  he  rises  to  a 
dim  height  of  cosmic  reverie,  in  which  the 
whole  dream-world  is  dissolved. 

And  Nature's  self  did  vanish,  whither  no  man  wist. 

The  plan  is  uncompleted  :  the  eighth  canto 
is  but  begun  ;  and  there  were  to  have  been 
twenty-four.  But  the  poem  ends  there  as 
well  as  it  ever  could.  And  the  closing  strain, 
one  thinks,  cannot  but  have  been  in  Shake- 
speare's thought  when  he  penned  the  mightier 
lines  on  the  ultimate  transmutation  of  "  the 
great  globe  itself,"  that  should  leave  "  not 
a  wrack  behind " — anticipating  in  poetic 
ecstasy,  with  his  fellow  immortal,  the  remotest 
vision  of  the  prophetic  science  of  a  later  day. 

Thus,  starting  as  he  did  from  the  didactic 
standpoint  of  his  age,  acclaiming  the  aim  and 
matter  of  the  moralizing  historical  poets,  he 
rose  above  their  level  no  less  in  his  poetic 
reverie  than  in  his  command  of  beauty  ;  but 
he  remained  for  his  age  above  all  things  a 
moral  poet.  For  Milton  he  was  "  our  sage 
and  serious  poet,"  "  a  better  teacher  than 
Scotus  or  Aquinas  " — as  well  as  a  master  in 
phrase  and  melody ;  for  Drayton  he  was 
"  grave  moral  Spenser.'*    Neither  these  nor 


SPENSER  83 

any  of  his  contemporaries  have  commented 
on  the  curious  fact  that  the  great  singer  has 
not  given  us  one  song,  in  the  ordinary  sense 
of  the  term.  "  The  woods  were  full  of  them," 
so  to  speak  ;  but  he  has  no  woodnote  wild, 
such  as  Milton  heard  in  Shakespeare,  no  song 
for  sheer  singing.  Though  the  Epithalamion 
and  Prothalamion  are  in  a  sense  nobly  lyrical, 
they  are  yet  reflective,  constructive,  woven 
harmonies  of  violins  and  bassoons,  never 
sounding  the  lyrical  cry.  There  is  no  "  Hark, 
hark,  the  lark  at  heaven's  gate  sings,"  no 
"  Drink  to  me  only  with  thine  eyes,"  in  all 
Spenser.  The  moral  poet  needs  a  text :  only 
in  virtue  of  that  does  he  frame  his  sonnets, 
styled  by  him  "  Amoretti." 

In  that  vein,  he  is  among  the  best  of  the 
sonneteers,  though  he  does  not  surpass  the 
finest  of  Sidney  and  Drayton,  to  say  nothing 
of  Shakespeare,  who,  somewhat  surprisingly, 
excels  him  alike  in  fluidity  and  in  distinction 
(though  these  are  qualities  of  his)  no  less 
than  in  the  undertones  which  give  depth  and 
strength.  Spenser's  sonnets  are  pretty  much 
in  one  key,  that  of  rapture,  varied  only  by  the 
customary  indictment  of  the  cruel  fair  or 
sigh  for  the  absent  one  ;  and  out  of  the  eighty- 
eight  it  would  be  hard  to  cull  confidently  a 
golden  masterpiece  ;  though  the  68th,  "  Most 
glorious  Lord  of  Life,"  is  well  sustained,  and 
the  34th  and  70th  are  tuneful  in  the  way  of 
the  Faerie  Queene.     What  is  most  surprising 


84   ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

I  in  all  his  work,  however,  is  that  the  master  of 
I  elegy  should  in  his  Astrophel,  the  dirge  for 
the  dead  and  adored  Sidney,  succeed  no  better 
than  any  other  performer.  It  would  seem 
that  the  personal  and  intimate  grief  shook  and 
stunned  the  brooding  singer,  disabling  him 
for  his  characteristic  harmonies,  and  com- 
pelling him  to  have  recourse  to  conventional 
fantasy  and  rhetoric.  In  his  dirge  in  The 
Ruins  of  Time  for  the  less  lovable  Leicester, 
Sidney's  uncle,  he  sounds  a  far  more  memor- 
able note : 

I  saw  him  die,  I  saw  him  die  as  one 
Of  the  mean  people  .  .  . 

The  romantic  poet,  as  was  dramatically 
fitting,  himself  met  tragic  misfortune,  and 
died  in  a  climax  of  distress  which,  though 
the  misery  of  the  closing  scene  was  doubtless 
exaggerated,  moved  deeply  the  culture-class 
of  an  age  that  had  already  pedestalled  him. 
His  professed  purpose  of  moralizing  it  had 
perforce  come  to  naught.  If  his  great  poem 
had  any  social  influence,  it  must  have  been 
rather  hardening  than  otherwise  :  he  did  but 
teach  his  countrymen  to  hate  their  neighbours, 
as  they  were  more  than  ready  to  do.  He 
had  none  of  the  kindly  ironic  humour  of 
Ariosto :  sardonic  satire  is  his  only  ap- 
proximation to  laughter ;  and  he  learned 
nothing  even  of  Christian  cosmopolitanism 
from  Tasso.     In  so  far  as  men  are  conceivably 


SPENSER  85 

to  be  made  better  by  moral  poetry,  the  lesson 
was  given  in  that  age,  if  at  all,  by  the  artists 
whose  work  was  "drenched  in  flesh  and  blood," 
and  who  could  thus  in  some  measure  teach 
their  fellows  to  know  themselves.  Spenser, 
far  more  highly  acclaimed  in  his  day  than 
these,  had  not  their  power  to  enlarge  men's 
outlook  on  life.  But  he  gave  his  countrymen 
of  his  best,  and  the  gift  has  ever  since  been 
cherished.  He  made  for  them  a  manifold 
music  ;  and  to  few  is  it  given  to  render  a  more 
excellent  service. 


CHAPTER    V 

THE   PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN   DRAMA 

Between  the  "  interlude  "  of  the  age  of 
Henry  VIII  and  the  drama  of  the  closing 
decades  of  the  reign  of  Elizabeth  there  is 
a  sunderance  in  species  which  at  a  glance  tells 
of  new  departures.  The  interlude  or  "  mor- 
ality "  play  is  essentially  an  allegory,  and 
typically  rehgious.  Bishop  Bale,  who  reveals 
some  real  dramatic  feCTiTty^  through  his  di- 
dactic purpose,  introduces  in  his  KingJohari- 
(1548  ?)  a  historical  element  which  may  be 
said  to  prelude  the  chronicle  play  ;  but  even 
there  he  works  with  allegorical  as  well  as 
historical  figures,  and  makes  drama  out  of 


86      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

abstractions  of  moral  and  political  and  ecclesi- 
astical tendencies  and  interests.  Interludes 
of  the  old  species  continued  to  be  produced 
as  late  as  1580,  when  Stephen  Gossbn's  Play 
of  Plays,  otherwise  Delight,  included  the 
characters  of  Life,  Delight,  Zeal,  Glut,  Recrea- 
tion, and  Tediousness ;  and  the  device  of 
abstraction  was  employed  much  later  still, 
as  in  Jonson's  Court  masques.  But  already 
in  1580,  as  Gosson  testifies,  a  multitude  of 
story-plays,  drawn  from  Italian  and  Spanish 
tales,  of  which  Painter's  Palace  of  Pleasure 
is  the  great  storehouse,  had  been  performed 
in  the  London  theatres.  These  early  dramas 
seem  to  have  been  written  partly  in  the  old 
irregular  verse,  partly  in  prose. 
/>  Drama  of  the  "  Elizabethan  "  species  begins 
/  to  emerge  before  rhyme  begins  to  be  super- 
seded by  blank  verse.  The  Damon  and 
Pythias  of  Richard  Edwards  (1563)  and  the 
first  Apius  and  Virginia  (1567),  a  more  not- 
able work  for  its  time  than  the  later  play  of 
Webster  on  the  same  theme,  have  reached  the 
plane  of  character-drama  proper  ;  as  have  the 
comedy  of  Ralph  Roister -Doister,  by  Nicholas 
Udall  (1562),  and  John  Still's  vigorous  farce 
of  Gammer  Gurton'^s  Needle  {circa  1566) ; 
though  in  the  latter  the  law  of  farce  sub- 
ordinates character  to  comic  action.  These 
performances  of  Edwards,  Udall,  and  Still  are 
all  in  the  rough,  irregular  verse  of  the  inter- 
ludes,   a   rude   metre   which   represents   the 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  87 

/>.decay  of  the  regular  Chaucerian  verse,  with 
its  French-sounded  final  ^'s,  into  an  English 
line  at  first  capable  of  no  regular  scansion 
and  only  gradually  to  be  raised  to  strict 
naetre.  Apius  and  Virginia  represents  a 
capable  attempt  to  regularize  the  old  verse 
in  keeping  with  recent  progress  in,  non- 
dramatic  poetry ;  and  at  the  same  time  to 
give  human  interest  to  the  play  of  personality 
alongside  of  the  old  abstractions  of  Conscience, 
Justice,  Comfort,  Doctrina,  Haphazard,  and 
Vice,  and  so  on.  Damon  and  Pythias,  though 
the  work  of  the  "Master  of  the  Children  of 
the  Chapel  "  who  acted  it,  is  much  ruder  in 
point  of  its  versification,  which  is  largely 
rough  doggerel ;  but  it  is  in  some  important 
respects  nearer  to  drama  proper,  having  dis- 
pensed with  allegory  and  abstraction.  The 
prologue  explains  that  the  author,  by  a  "  sud- 
den change,"  has  turned  from  a  "  comical  " 
vein  of  doubtful  taste  :  "  and  yet,"  he  goes 
on — 

And  yet  (worshipful    audience)  thus  much  I  dare 

avouch : 
In  comedies  the  greatest  skill  is  this,  rightly  to  touch 
All  things  to  the  quick  ;  and  eke  to  frame  each  person 

so 
That  by  his  conmion  talk  you  may  his  nature  rightly 

know. 
A  roister  ought  not  preach  :  that  were  too  strange  to 

hear, 

and  so  on.     Thus  we  are  still  in  the  drama  of 


S8      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

types,  though  not  in  that  of  abstractions  ;  and 
the  author,  obeying  the  command  of  Horace — 

In  all  such  kind  of  exercise  decorum  to  observe — 

presents  "  matter  mix'd  with  mirth  and  care," 
to  which 

A  just  name  to  apply 
As  seems  most  fit  we  have  it  termed  a  tragical  comedy. 

His  ideal  is  thus  properly  dramatic ;   though 
in  the  primitive  manner  he  makes  his  person- 
ages address  the  audience  as  freely  as  they 
do  each  other.    We  are  at  a  stage  of  transi- 
tion between  dramatic  moral  teaching  and 
the  reproduction  of  life. 
'        The  starting-point  of  the    typical  drama 
of  the  Shakespearean  age  is  obviously  the 
academic  Gorboduc,  or  Ferrex  and  Porrex,  of 
Sa^kville  (1561),  written  in  the  new  regular 
blanli  verse  of  Surrey,  and  constructed  on 
the   model    of  the   late   Latin   tragedies   of 
Seneca.     The    interlude    is    now    definitely 
,  transcended.     Here  we  have  presentments  of 
I  personality,  of  chgLiacter,  of  historicLjiction. 
I  Tbb^peTsons,  indeed,  are  ratheraoitracrEions 
j  of  types  of  action  than  studies  of  human 
'  beings,  although  the  action  is  quasi-historical ; 
but  none  the  less  the  historical^lay  and  the 
character-play  are  here  in  germ  ;  and  we  find 
clear  S^es  of  the  influence  of  this  early  model 
in  the  serious  work  of  the  group  of  poet-play- 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  89 

Wrights  of  the  next  generation  who  immedi- 
ately preceded  Shakespeare.  And  yet  the 
most  essential  principle  of  th^  Senecan  tragedy, 
l^ere  fully  present,^  was  entirely  set  aside  later, 
Senecaii  "Tragedy   follows   and   impoverishes 

the  Greek  in  its  rpdijotion  of  ^r^timitn  narrA.- 

tiye.  On  that  stage  the  tragic  events  are  not 
enacted  ;  they  are  described  and  deplored  ; 
and  the  master-characteristic  of  the  later 
Elizabethan  drama  —  continuous  vehement 
and  tempestuous  action — is  excluded  by  the 
law  of  unity  of  place  and  the  descriptive 
function  of  the  chorus.  In  the  Jocasta  of 
George  Gascoigne  and  his  collaborators 
(1566),  a  free  adaptation  of  an  Italian  adapta- 
tion of  the  Phoenissce  of  Euripides,  another 
notable  attempt  is  made  to  establish  classic 
tragedy  in  English ;  but  that  play,  like 
Gorboduc,  never  got  beyond  the  subsidized 
stage  of  the  universities,  the  Inns  of  Court, 
and  the  Court.  The  populace  would  have 
none  of  them.  So  with  Robert  Wilmot's 
tragedy  of  Tancred  and  Gismunda^  played 
before  the  Queen  at  the  Inner  Temple  in  1568, 
and  re-written  in  blank  verse  of  the  early  style 
of  Surrey  and  Sackville  in  1591.  The  piece, 
"  tending  o^lyJtCLthe  exaltation  of  virtue  and 
■  suppression _o.f  vice,''  is  Scnecan  through  and 
through  ;  as  is  Thomas  Hughes's  Misfortunes 
of  \Srihur  (1587),  to  which  several  amateurs 
contributed  speeches  and  choruses,  and  in 
which  Bacon  helped  with  the  "  dumb  shows/' 


90      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Written  in  scholarly  blank  verse,  but  without 
dramatic  feeling,  such  pja^s  had  no^s^^ 
And  here  emerges  the  process  of  economic 
causation  which  resulted  in  the  Elizabethan 
drama,  commonly  so  called. 

The  vital  divergence  which  took  place  in 
that  age  between  the  drama  of  England  and 
that  of  France  is  commonly  explained  as  an 
expression  of  the  divergent  minds  or  tem- 
peraments of  the  two  nations.  Englishmen 
are  supposed  to  have  demanded  one  kind  of 
art ;  and  Frenchmen  another.  But  there  is 
no  good  ground  for  such  a  theory  of  human 
nature  as  is  involved  in  saying  that  the 
composite  population  of  England  could  take 
satisfaction  only  in  a  dramatic  form  which 
was  repugnant  to  the  equally  composite 
population  of  France.  The  fact  is  that  the 
French  populace  never  had  the  chanc^  that 
was  offered  to  the  English  of  determining  the 
line  of  eyoTuJIon^  o^^^  literary  drama.  Of 
nalurai"  verve  there  is  abundance  in  the 
multitudinous  old  French  farce  of  the  fifteenth 
and  sixteenth  centuries,  of  which  Maitre 
Pathelin  is  the  best  example.  It  stands  for  an 
evolution  far  in  advance  of  anything  reached 
in  England  till  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth 
century,  though  there  too  there  was  a  good 
deal  of  simple  farce  in  the  Miracle  Plays  annu- 
ally produced  by  the  trade  guilds.  It  was,  in 
fact,  the  very  freedom  of  action  in  the  French 
popular  drama,  transgressing  all  bounds  of 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  91 

decency,  that  made  possible  the  reaction  to 
strict  classicism  in  tragedy  in  the  period  in 
which  Italian  influence  brought  the  Sene- 
can  tragedy  into  French  favour.  The  early 
tragedies  of  the  school  of  Jodelle  (1552  on- 
wards) were  played  in  colleges,  for  scholastic 
audiences,  who  wanted  something  totally  re- 
moved alike  from  farce  and  the  popular 
"  mystery "  plays,  which  were  hardly  less 
indecent.  About  the  same  period  there  ap- 
peared "  Moralities  "  of  a  historical  character, 
involving  real  action ;  but  political  drama 
was  a  dangerous  course  in  monarchic  France, 
and  the  species  could  not  flourish. 

It  was  in  the  same  generation  that  French 
adaptation  of  Italian  comedy  set  up  the  plane 
of  transition  from  the  old  farce  to  the  later 
comedy  of  Moli^re,  by  way  of  the  interlude  of 
Spanish  influence  at  the  close  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  At  this  stage  the  classic  convention 
was  shaken  to  the  extent  of  a  rejection  by 
more  than  one  playwright  of  the  rule  of  the 
unities  of  time  and  place.  The  most  produc- 
tive of  these  dramatists,  Alexandre  Hardy, 
who  then  came  to  the  front,  and  who  is 
reckoned  to  have  written  in  all  some  six  hun- 
dred plays,  was  no  poet ;  and  even  if  he  were, 
could  not  have  maintained  even  a  fair  level 
of  workmanship  in  such  a  vast  mass  of  com- 
position. But  while  leaning  in  his  tragedies 
to  the  classic  tradition,  he  innovated  by  sup- 
pressing the  chorus,  by  multiplying  scenes  and 


92      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

actions,  and  by  curtailing  the  monologue. 
His  enormous  production,  further,  seems  to 
have  been  due  to  the  extreme  smallness  of  his 
pay,  which  was  necessarily  affected  by  the 
heavy  taxes  levied  on  the  travelling  companies 
by  the  municipalities  in  name  of  poor-rate  ; 
and  by  the  heavy  "  free  list  "  in  Paris.  His 
remuneration  in  his  best  days  ran  from  two 
to  five  crowns  !  Most  of  his  plays  must  have 
been  "  pieces  of  occasion  "  ;  yet  he  has  left 
over  thirty  tragedies,  mostly  on  classical  sub- 
jects. Meanwhile,  the  more  literary  tragedies 
of  the  schools  of  Jodelle  and  Garnier  were  the 
monopolies  of  colleges,  and  constituted  the 
resort  of  all  the  respectable  people  who  were 
repelled  by  the  gross  indecencies  of  the  still 
prevailing  farces.  Many  of  the  plays,  too, 
were  in  long  sequences  or  series,  running  for 
six  or  eight  days — a  kind  of  entertainment 
never  meant  for  the  populace,  who  continued 
to  patronize  the  farces  all  the  more  when  the 
authorities  sought  to  keep  them  within  bounds 
by  administrative  measures. 

Finally,  the  Court,  represented  by  the 
masterful  Richelieu,  took  under  its  patronage 
the  classic  tragedy,  attracting  to  that,  by 
rewards,  poets  of  much  greater  culture  than 
Hardy  ;  and  a  tragic  drama  which,  if  left  free 
to  grow  in  its  own  way,  might  have  tran- 
scended Hardy  on  native  lines,  was  tied  down 
to  the  ill-comprehended  law  of  the  unities. 
Rotrou  refused  to  obey,   but  the  combined 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  93 

influence  of  Richelieu  and  the  Academy  which 
he  founded  and  ruled  was  decisive  for  Cor- 
neille ;  and  the  form  and  spirit  of  French 
tragedy  by  him  established  were  fixed  for  two 
hundred  years.  Classic  forms  are  the  outcome 
of  previousconditions ';  but, jDnce"^e9rthey 
command  allegiance. 

The  rapid  development  of  a  powerful  native 
drama  in  Elizabethan  England  can  now  be 
seen  to  be  due  to  the  different  social  and  I 
economic  conditions.  To  begin  with,  the  I 
universal  practice  of  running  Miracle  Plays 
or  Mysteries  at  Eastertide,  Whitsuntide,  and 
other  religious  festival-times,  set  up  at  once  a 
training-ground  for  actors  and  a  popular  pro- 
clivity to  things  dramatic.  On  this  basis 
proceeded  the  development  of  both  acting 
and  play-making.  As  early  as  the  reign  of 
Henry  VIII,  it  was  the  fashion  for  noblemen  ^ 
to  have  companies  of  players  in  their  occa- 
sional service  ;  and  this  practice  continued 
throughout  the  century.  The  companies  of 
players,  to  begin  with,  had  thus  a  certain 
economic  basis  in  the  patronage  of  the  nobles 
who  primarily  retained  them  ;  and  when  they 
played  in  London  they  were  not  "  protected  " 
as  were  those  of  Paris,  where  one  or  two  com- 
panies held  a  monopoly  under  which  they  prac- 
tically defied  the  control  of  the  authorities, 
who  were  always  complaining  of  their  licence. 
In  1583  the  Queen  set  up  a  company  of  her 
own  ;  but  that  h?id  no  special  immunities. 


94      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

The  London  theatre  about  this  period  seems 
to  have  been  coarse  enough ;  but  freedom, 
as  always,  was  in  the  end  favourable  to 
decency,  a  certain  standard  being  set  up  in 
the  effort  to  appeal  to  all  classes.  We  get  a 
fair  notion  of  the  kind  of  comedy  in  vogue 
from  Fedele  and  Fortunio :  the  two  Italian 
Gentlemen,  translated  by  Thomas  Hackett 
from  the  Italian  of  Luigi  Pasqualigo,  and 
printed  in  1584.  Here  the  staple  verse  is  the 
old  "  fourteener,"  still  written  in  large  part 
with  the  most  heedless  irregularity,  and  gener- 
ally running  to  doggerel,  but  variegated  with 
perfectly  regular  dialogue  in  stanzas,  carefully 
executed.  The  plot  is  thoroughly  Italian,  a 
ceaseless  bustle  of  intrigue  and  deception, 
disguises,  tricks,  rival  lovers,  maid  and  mis- 
tress and  go-between,  all  devoid  of  character 
interest,  save  as  regards  the  established  types 
of  the  Pedant  and  the  bombastic  soldier. 
The  latter  receives  the  English  name  of  Cap- 
tain Crackstone ;  but  the  others  are  all 
Italians,  as  was  to  be  the  rule  on  the  English 
stage  for  two  generations.  It  was  in  fact, 
despite  the  lead  of  Edwards,  mainly  by 
Italian  comedy  that  the  lift  was  given  to  the 
English  theatre  out  of  the  methods  of  the 
morality  play,  with  its  abstract  personages  ; 
and  at  the  outset  the  new  drama  is  nearer 
farce  than  comedy,  though  there  are  many 
Latin  quotations,  and  the  Pedant  reads  out 
an  Italian  letter,  which  he  translates.     The 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  95 

stage  directions  show  that  already  there  was 
regular  music  between  the  acts  :  "  The  first 
Act  being  ended,  the  Consort  of  Musique 
soundeth  a  pleasant  Galliard  "  ;  "  The  third 
Act  being  ended,  the  Consort  sounds  a  solemn 
Dump  "  ;  ''  The  fourth  Act  being  ended,  the 
Consort  soundeth  a  pleasant  Allemaigne  "  ; 
and  so  on.  Evidently  the  theatre  sought  to 
entertain  the  educated  as  well  as  other  classes. 
Then,  after  the  semi-popular  plays  of  the 
scholarly  Lilly,  ranging  from  rustic  comedy  to 
quasi-mythological  pieces  fitted  for  the  Court, 
came  the  run  of  historical  or  "  chronicle " 
plays  which  made  the  ground  for  Shakespeare. 
The  framing  and  rejcasting,j3i„th^^^ 
which  seem  first  to  have  been. scribbled  by 
half-educated  actors,  became  a  means  of 
h^nd- tQ-niQUtJt~li^^lilictQd  f  or^  JBoliemianuni- 
versity  me^nj_who  write 

for  a  general„,^udience  that  did  not  want 
Senecan  tragedy.  It  was  not  that  English 
scffolars  were  averse  to  the  Senecan  model. 
In  point  of  fact,  as  we  have  seen,  that  moael 
had  been  dutifully  welcomed  by  scholarly 
and  semi-scholarly  poets  ;  it  had  the  respect- 
able suffrages  to  such  an  extent  that  it  in- 
fluenced even  the  popular  stage  ;  and  as  late 
as  the  last  decade  of  Elizabeth's  reign  trans- 
lations from  the  French  tragedies  of  Garnier 
were  published  by  Thomas  Kyd,  a  popular 
playwright  on  native  lines,  and  by  the  poet 
Samuel  Daniel,  under  the  influence  of  the 


96      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

classic  bias  fostered  by  Sidney,  and  after  his 
death  by  his  sister,  the  Countess  of  Pembroke. 
A  distinct  Senecan  influence  indeed  marks  the 
work  of  Kyd,  Greene,  and  Peele.  But  the 
living  drama  rose  out  of  the  "  effective  de- 
mand  "  of  the  populace  for  a  kind  of  play 
suited  to  its  taste  and  ca£acitv ;  and  in  the 
liberty^o'^ieetjEhat  deniand  lay  the  secret 
of  the  English  evolution.  The_actors  must 
have  audiences ;  and  the  playwrights  had  to 
cater  for  their  requirements,  to  the  extent  even 
of  mixing  farce  with  history  and  tragedy. 
Many  plays,  in  rhyme  and  in  prose,  had  been 
produced  under  those  conditions  by  men  of 
small  culture :  it  was  the  need  to  draw 
educated  as  well  as  uneducated  spectators,  to 
please  alternately  the  Court  and  the  commons, 
that  led  to  the  enlistment  of  educated  men, 
capable  of  producing  dignified  and  sonorous 
poetry.  From  first  to  last,  the  economic 
factor  counts. 

In  the  lives  of  Kyd,  Peele,  Greene,  and 
Marlowe  we  see  how  the  economic  demand 
operated.  The  companies  which  played  in 
the  early  Lan3bn^th^res,-nal3^^ 
the  Chamberlain's,  and  the  Admirars,  sought 
from  the  playwrights  new  plays  ^suited  to  the 
popular  stage ;  and  between  the  theatrical 
oemandTor  interesting  action  and  the  literary 
preparation  of  the  scholar-playwrights  there 
was  evolved  the  blank- verse  drama  of  vigorous 
changing   action,   freed   from  the   cramping 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  97 

unities  of  time  and  place,  and  marked  by  a 
blending  or  alternation  of  serious  and  comic 
scenes.  The  academic  training  meant  a 
/^resort  to  verse  ;  and  after  the  notable  success 
of  Kyd's  Spanish  Tragedy  *  and  Marlowe's 
Tamburlaine,  the  value  of  the  freedom  of 
blank  verse  was  felt  to  be  proved.  Most  of 
the  plays  produced  before  1585  have  dis- 
appeared ;  but  we  know  frorn  the  censures 
of  Sidney  in  his  Defence  of  Poetry,  and  from 
those  of  Whetstone  in  the  preface  to  his  Promos 
and  Cassandra  (the  basis  of  Shakespeare's 
Measure  for  Measure),  that  a  reckless  dis- 
regard of  the  unities  was  a  coimnoii  feature. 
Audren5es"^efe  to  be  wd^^  the   human 

interest  in  a  personage  who  appeared  to  them 
first  as  a  child,  then  grew  up  and  won  fame 
and  fortune  by  adventures  in  foreign  lands. 
The  old  machinery  of  princesses,  enchanters 
and  dragons  was  freely  employed,  simply 
because  it  was  popular  ;  and  scenes  of  clown- 
ing were  common  simply  because  the  audiences 
would  have  them,  as  they  and  their  fathers 
before  them  had  been  wont  to  do  in  the  old 
Miracle  Plays  and  Mysteries.  Above  all, 
actors  wanted  speeches  which  they  could 
deliver  with  some  effect  of  reality  :  and  the 
two  arts,  the  mimetic  and  the  poetic,  in- 
evitably reacted  on  each  other. 

One  scholarly  dramatist  intervened  who 
did  not  take  what  w^as  to  be  the  beaten  path. 
John  Lilly  or  Lyly,  after  making  his  fashion- 

7 


98      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

able  success  in  didactic  and  "stylistic"  prose 
}  fiction  with  his  two  Euphues  books  in  1579 
j  and  1580,  abandoned  for  ever  that  style  of 
writing,  and  became  a  maker  of  "Court" 
j,  comedies.  In  this  walk  too  he  mef^'WitH"' 
''  success,  though,  writing  as  he  did  for  the 
companies  of  child-actors  of  St.  Paul's  School, 
of  which  he  was  vice-master,  he  could  not 
hope  to  secure  great  theatrical  effects,  and 
did  not  seek  to  do  so.  In  only  one  play,  The 
Woman  in  the  Moon^  did  he  essay  blank- 
verse  ;  and  in  only  one  other.  Mother  Bomhie, 
did  he  deal  with  English  life ;  all  the  rest 
being  on  mythological  themes,  though  with 
a  variety  of  contemporary  applications.  The 
children  of  Chapel  Royal  played  several  of 
his  plays.  Endymion  is  an  elaborate  glorifica- 
tion of  the  Queen,  and  other  Court  person- 
ages are  supposed  to  be  indicated  in  that 
and  others  of  his  pieces ;  but  he  never  won 
favour  enough  to  secure  the  preferment  for 
which  he  longed  :  and  if  the  Pandora  of  the 
Woman  in  the  Moon  were  taken,  as  it  appar- 
ently must  have  been,  for  Elizabeth,  his  ill- 
fortune  is  not  hard  to  understand.  If  it  was 
his  revenge  for  non-fulfilment  of  Court  pro- 
mises, it  was  a  fatal  one.  For  the  second 
time — offence  having  been  previously  given 
by  the  veiled  politics  of  Midas — the  children 
of  Paul's  were  inhibited  from  playing ;  and 
Lilly  withdrew  to  his  "  cell "  of  retirement, 
and  to  the  poverty  which  fell  upon  most  of 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA   99 

the  playwrights  of  the  age.  "  Our  pleasant 
Willy,  ah,  is  dead  of  late,"  wrote  Spenser 
in  his  Tears  of  the  Muses  (1590) — almost  cer- 
tainly referring  to  our  dramatist.  His  work 
was  done.  It  undoubtedly  affected  other 
men's  method  in  comedy,  including  Shake- 
speare's :  the  Sir  Tophas  of  Endymion  gave 
hints  for  Sir  Toby  Belch  and  Falstaff ;  and 
the  Euphuistic  dialogue  of  this  and  others  of 
his  seven  pieces  is  clearly  reflected  in  the 
Shakespearean  and  other  comedy  which  fol- 
lowed. But  the  whole  set  remain,  like 
EuphueSy  things  of  their  period,  products  of 
clever  workmanship  that  always  falls  short 
of  genius,  though  always  original  in  their 
way.  The  tragedy  which  was  the  highest 
reach  of  his  generation  Lilly  never  essayed. 

That  grew  out  of  older  and  more  deeply 
rooted  forms.  Thomas  Kyd's  Spanish 
Tragedy,  an  early  "  classic,"  first  played  per- 
haps about  1585,  tells  already  of  a  consider- 
able evolution.  It  borrows  from  Senecan 
tragedy  the  idea  of  a  series  of  revenges  and 
retributions,  and  the  machinery  of  an  aveng- 
ing ghost.  But  the  plot,  the  marshalling  of 
a  bustling  and  stirring  series  of  events,  keeping 
the  spectator's  interest  on  tension,  is  the 
outcome  of  the  English  conditions.  In  one 
scene  two  lovers  exchange  amorous  talk,  and 
the  man  is  seized  and  hanged  before  the 
woman's  eyes — a  thing  impossible  on  the 
classic  stage  of  France.     The  bereaved  father 


100      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

and  mother  pass  through  long-drawn  griefs 
and  frenzies  which  demand  from  the  actors 
all  that  their  mimetic  art  could  do ;  and 
the  ultimate  revenge  on  all  the  wrongers 
is  accomplished  by  a  complex  machinery  of 
stratagem  which  would  hold  a  simple-minded 
audience  breathless.  An  exciting  series  of 
events  is  the  first  requisite  :  poetic  declama- 
tion is  the  spontaneous  contribution  of  the 
dramatist,  reared  on  Seneca  and  on  Senecan 
styles. 

From  such  beginnings  the  blank-verse 
drama  climbed  within  a  dozen  years  to  the 
music  and  the  magic  of  The  Merchant  of 
Venice ;  and  in  a  few  years  more  to  the 
storm-swept  heights  of  Othello  and  Lear. 
Nothing  is  more  remarkable  in  that  age  of 
leaping  growth  than  the  rapid  development 
of  nearly  all  of  the  more  active  practitioners. 
Kyd's  Spanish  Tragedy  has  little  in  the 
nature  of  individual  characterization :  the 
bereaved  father  Hieronimo  is  rather  a  rhe- 
torical type  than  a  person  ;  and  the  heroine, 
Bellimperia,  is  hardly  more  than  a  plot-per- 
sonage ;  though  the  villains,  who  in  some 
scenes  are  perhaps  supplied  by  another  hand, 
are  vigorously  drawn.  But  if,  as  is  now  sub- 
stantially certain,  Kyd  wrote  Arden  of  Fevers- 
ham  (1592),  he  had  in  a  few  years  acquired 
the  power  of  putting  in  lifelike  action  real 
men  and  women,  villains  drawn  from  actual 
observation,  tragedy  that  grows  out  of  every- 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREANiD.RAMA  101 

day  life,  actual  contemporary  character, 
passion,  and  crime.  So  simply  strong  is  that 
work  as  a  whole  that  many  critics,  disregard- 
ing the  profound  differences  of  verse  technique 
and  verbal  art,  have  ascribed  the  play  to 
Shakespeare,  as  being  alone  capable  of  such 
power  of  portraiture.  And,  indeed,  the  pro- 
duction of  such  a  piece  by  Kyd  might  have 
seemed  impossible  if  we  had  not  the  indispu- 
table cases  of  Marlowe  and  Greene,  whose 
swift  rise  from  crude  to  relatively  ripe  art  is 
in  its  way  as  signal  as  the  progression  of 
Shakespeare  from  Venus  and  Adonis  to 
Antony  and  Cleopatra.  .,-'— i 

The  advent  of  Marlowe  in  the  drama  is   I 
somewhat  like  the  portent  of  his  Tamburlaine  « 
in  the  field  of  history.     At  one  stroke  a  new. 
and  exorbitant  energy  makes  a  clean  sweep  1 
of  existing  conventions,   and  barbaric  force  I 
drives  its  path  athwart  the  overthrown  pre-  j 
tensions   of  all   who   had   held   the  ground. 
As  one  who  sounds  a  trumpet,  he  tells  his 
audience  that  he  calls  them  away  from  "  jig- 
ging   veins    of   rhyming    mother- wits "    and 
leads  them  to  "  the  stately  tent  of  war."     It 
is  less  a  play  than  a  pageant  of  strife,  slaugh- 
ter, and  victory,  in  wh.ch  the  strxding  con- 
queror,   "  in   high   astounding   terms,"    pro- 
claims the  progress  of  his  ruthless  triumph 
over  the   kingdoms   of  the  world.     Such   a 
picture   of   savage   megalomania   had   never 
before  been  staged  ;    such  thunderous  force 


/ 


102     ^ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

of  rhythmic  phrase  had  never  yet  been  found 
possible  in  any  modern  language.  And  it  is 
the  spontaneous  primary  utterance  of  the 
poet's  own  mastering  dream  of  greatness.  In 
a  famous  passage  of  Tamburlaine  he  sings  the 
rapture  of  the  quest  of  the  impossible  : 

If  all  the  pens  that  ever  poets  held 
Had  fed  the  feeling  of  their  masters'  thoughts. 
And  every  sweetness  that  inspired  their  hearts. 
Their  minds  and  muses  on  admired  themes  ; 
If  all  the  heavenly  quintessence  they  'stil 
From  their  immortal  flowers  of  poesy. 
Wherein,  as  in  a  mirror,  we  perceive 
The  highest  reaches  of  a  human  wit ; 
If  these  had  made  one  poem's  period 
And  all  combin'd  in  beauty's  worthiness. 
Yet  should  there  hover  in  their  restless  heads 
One  thought,  one  grace,  one  wonder,  at  the  least, 
Which  into  words  no  virtue  could  digest. 

How,  we  are  moved  to  ask — how  came  such 
a  golden  strain  to  soar  from  the  brazen 
orchestra  that  thunders  forth  the  fierce  tale  of 
the  Scythian  war-lord  ?  The  answer  is  that 
the  poetry  and  the  dramaturgy  express  but 
i  phases  of  the  same  psychosis.  It  was  even 
I  such  a  passion  for  the  utmost  things  that 
^  carried  Marlowe  in  a  few  crowded  years  from 
the  clangours  of  Tamburlaine  to  the  far  more 
<»omplex  and  intellectual  presentment  of  ex- 
orbitant ambitions  in  the  Jew  of  Malta  and 
Doctor  Faustus.  Barabas  compasses  bound- 
less wealth — pictured  with  all  Marlowe's 
burning  splendour  of  verbal  colour — and  seeks 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  103 

to  wreak  without  limit  his  lawless  and 
maHgnant  will :  Faustus,  finding  no  rest  in 
the  heaping-up"of  all  science,  "  still  climbing 
after  knowledge  infinite,"  as  Tamburlaine 
before,  will  compass  at  any  cost  the  utmost  / 
scope  of  human  desire,  and  naught  less  than 
Helen's  self  shall  content  him. 

In  the  no  less  original  historical  play  of 
Edward  II,  partly  disfigured  as  it  is,  like 
Faustus^  by  the  additions  and  perversions 
of  alien  hands,  we  find  portrayed  the  same 
intense  stresses  of  will,  with  the  same  dramatic 
counterplay  of  fate,  destroying  the  wild  j 
egotist  whom  the  gods  had  made  mad.  For  ^ 
Marlowe  was  no  mere  singer  of  the  Superman^ 
no  mere  mouthpiece  of  self-asserting  passion. 
His  dramas  are  wholes,  planned  for  their 
climax  and  catastrophe :  that  of  the  ruth- 
less, all-grasping  Tamburlaine,  the  ''  fiery 
thirster  after  sovereignty,"  laid  low  by  mere 
inevitable  death ;  that  of  the  demoniacal 
Jew  shattered  at  length  by  the  moral  play 
of  normal  mundane  forces  ;  that  of  the  insati- 
able Faustus  paying  his  supernatural  penalty ; 
that  of  the  vicious  and  ungovernable  king 
brought  to  humiliation  and  death  by  his  own 
frowardness.  Pitiful  as  was  his  end,  slain 
in  a  low  tavern  brawl,  the  framer  of  these 
dramas  was  something  more  than  a  flute  of 
wild  emotion,  "fit  to  write  passions  for  the  t^ 
souls  below."  lie  was  more  than  audacious 
in  his  freethinking,   and  he  seems  to  have 


104      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

been  strangeiy  wild  in  his  talk  :  but  there 
lay  in  him  the  seed  of  the  sanity  of  true 
genius  ;  and  had  he  been  granted  but  an- 
other decade,  he  might,  despite  his  serious 
lack  of  humour,  have  left  us  something  of 
Olympian  mastery,  the  fruition  of  the  Titanic 
power  that  was  struck  down  when  he  had 
but  attained  the  age  at  which  Shakespeare 
produced  Venus  and  Adonis.  His  epitaph 
is  for  ever  that  of  his  own  lines  : 

Cut  is  the  branch  that  might  have  grown  full  straight. 

And  burned  is  Apollo's  laurel  bough 

That  sometime  grew  within  this  learned  man. 

Two  university  men  of  the  day,  Robert 
;  Greene  the  novelist  and  George  Peele  the 
poet,  were  at  once  fascinated  by  Marlowe, 
copying  him,  from  the  moment  of  his  appear- 
ance, in  vocabulary,  style,  and  theme  ;  and 
Kyd  was  no  less  magnetized.  Greene,  with 
much  less  of  original  creative  power,  found  in 
drama,  where  he  followed  Marlowe's  lead,  a 
path  to  achievement  such  as  he  evidently 
could  not  have  reached  in  his  tediously  fluent 
prose  tales.  His  two  early  plays,  Orlando 
Furioso  and  Alphonsus  King  of  Arragon,  are 
so  much  facile  but  uninspired  pot-boiling  ; 
but  when  he  followed  Marlowe's  Faustus  with 
Friar  Bacon  and  Friar  Bungay  he  revealed  a 
power  which  Marlowe  had  not  shown,  that 
of  presenting  a  recognizably  real  woman,  ten- 
der and  true,  the  moral  superior  of  the  men 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  105 

around  her ;  and  in  King  James  the  Fourth, 
Queen  Dorothea,  named  after  the  poet's 
own  wronged  and  forgiving  wife,  forecasts  the 
noblest  types  of  womanhood  in  Shakespeare. 
It  is  this  special  power  of  perception  and  pre- 
sentment in  Greene  that  makes  him  quite 
conceivably  the  author  of  the  unsigned  play 
Edward  III,  of  which  the  second  act  is  so 
remarkable  for  its  dramatic  power  that,  like 
Arden  of  Fever  sham,  it  has  been  conjecturally 
assigned  by  many  critics  to  Shakespeare. 
But  the  style  is  not  Shakespeare's,  though  he 
copied  two  of  the  lines  in  his  Sonnets ;  and 
the  situation  of  the  tempter-king  and  the 
virtuous  woman  is  one  which  Greene  had 
handled  half-a-dozen  times  in  his  signed  tales 
and  plays,  notably  in  James  IV. 

If  Edward  III  be  his,  he  is  at  least  as 
likely  as  Marlowe  to  have  written  the  anony- 
mous Selimus,  a  reflex  of  Tamhurlaine,  com- 
pounded of  much  rant  and  not  a  little  power- 
ful Marlowesque  propaganda  in  what  was 
then  supposed  to  be  the  spirit  of  Machiavelli. 
The  best  passages  might  be  Marlowe's  own  ; 
but  whereas  the  lawless  egotists  in  Marlowe's 
plays  always  fall,  the  execrable  Selimus  re- 
mains unpunished  and  triumphant.  And 
this  suggests  the  hand  of  Greene,  who  is 
morally  less  sane  than  his  great  model.  His 
heroes,  like  himself,  sin  habitually  against 
good  feeling  even  when  they  are  not  pre- 
sented  as   defiers   of  moral   law :     and   the 


106      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

account  he  has  given  of  himself  in  his  death- 
bed performance,  A  Groatsworth  of  Wit  bought 
with  a  Million  of  Repentance  (1592),  presents 
a  character  vicious  in  grain  as  well  as  in  life. 
Yet  it  was  his  hand  that  first  put  upon  the 
Elizabethan  stage  the  figures  of  admirable 
women  "  nobly  planned,"  fountains  of  good- 
ness in  an  evil  world,  idealized,  of  course,  yet 
more  real  than  the  men  about  them.  Women 
of  the  contrary  type,  of  whom  he  had  met 
many,  he  hardly  ever  brings  upon  his  scene. 

But  Greene's  importance  in  the  Elizabethan 
drama  is  not  fully  to  be  measured  by  his 
signed  plays.  It  is  proved  by  several  testi- 
monies tnat  he  wrote  many  more  than  the 
half-dozen  now  printed  as  his.  Nashe  tells 
that  he  was  "  chief  agent  for  the  [Queen's] 
company  "  of  players,  and  "  writ  more  than 
four  other  "  ;  Chettle  declared  that  he  was  in 
his  time  "  the  only  comedian  of  a  vulgar 
[=  popular]  writer  in  this  coimtry  "  ;  and  an 
admirer,  with  the  initials  R.  B.,  claimed  in, 
15cr4  that 

the  men  that  so  eclipsed  his  fame 
Purloined  his  plumes  :   can  they  deny  the  same  ? 

Nashe  further  pronounces  that  in  "  plotting 
plays "  he  was  "  his  craft's  master."  All 
this  tells  not  only  of  a  wide  vogue,  but  of  a 
probable  survival  in  some  form  of  Greene's 
"  purloined  "  work.  As  the  Queen's  company, 
which  broke  up  at  the  end  of  1591,  had  been 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  107 

managed  by  Richard  Burbage,  who  was  after- 
wards one  of  the  partners  with  Shakespeare 
in  the  Lord  Chamberlain's,  it  seems  highly- 
probable  that  a  number  of  Greene's  comedies 
passed  into  the  repertory  of  the  latter,  and  were 
freshly  adapted  or  re-written  for  it  by  its 
rising  dramatist,  the  young  Shakespeare. 
How  far  the  debt  extended  we  cannot  tell ; 
but  debt  there  surely  was. 
!  George  Peele,  the  first  in  order  of  advent, 
/  but  not  in  importance,  of  the  group  of  uni- 
versity men  who  as  playwrights  cleared  the 
ground  for  Shakespeare,  has  left  nothing  so 
fine  as  Greene's  best  work,  and  nothing  so 
powerful  as  Marlowe's.  There  is  something  of 
poetry  in  his  slight  Old  Wive*s  Tale,  and  some- 
thing of  idyllic  grace  in  his  early  pastoral. 
The  Arraignment  of  Paris  (1584) ;  but  his 
elaborate  David  and  Beihsabe  is  rather  a 
rhetorical  exercise  in  play  form  than  a  creative 
drama.  He  has  little  command  of  the  living 
voice,  and  seems  most  at  home  in  writing 
patriotic  or  courtly  "  occasional "  verse, 
though  that  too  is  generally  laboured.  His 
Edward  I  is  the  most  unpleasant  of  all  the 
many  chronicle-plays  of  the  time ;  and  his 
Battle  of  Alcazar — which  like  Tamburlaine 
yielded  an  absurd  passage  of  which  the  young 
Shakespeare  made  fun — has  no  line  in  itself 
memorable.  His  surest  title  to  commemora- 
tion is  that  he  shared  with  Greene  and 
Marlowe  and  other  dramatists  in  the  compo- 


108      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

sition  of  one  or  other  of  certain  plays  which, 
being  acquired  by  Shakespeare's  company 
and  in  some  cases  more  or  less  fully  revised 
by  him,  have  come  down  to  us  bearing  the 
master's  name — to  wit,  King  John,  Henry  F, 
the  Henry  VI  trilogy,  Richard  III,  and,  it 
may  even  be,  Richard  II,  Peele,  further, 
certainly  had  a  main  hand  in  Titus  Andro- 
nicus,  where  Shakespeare's  hand  cannot  at  all 
be  traced  with  confidence  ;  and  he  was  prob- 
ably one  of  the  first  draughtsmen  of  Romeo 
and  Juliet,  where  the  "gallop  apace"  speech 
still  hints  of  his  phraseology— and  his  taste. 
The  novelist  Thomas  Lodge,  ostensibly  the 
least  theatrically  productive  of  the  four 
scholars  of  the  Marlowe-Greene  group,  is  the 
most  elusive.  We  have  from  him  only  one 
complete  signed  play,  Marius  and  Sylla  ;  or. 
The  Wounds  of  Civil  War,  probably  written 
about  1588,  published  in  1594  ;  and  one  com- 
posite signed  play,  the  Looking  Glass  for 
London,  in  which  (about  1590)  he  collaborated 
with  Greene ;  but  it  is  nearly  certain  that 
he  shared  in  other  pieces.  The  Troublesome 
Raigne  of  King  John,  published  in  1591,  has 
a  number  of  his  favourite  phrases  and  peculiar 
words ;  and  its  whole  versification  closely 
resembles  that  of  the  Wounds,  As  to  life, 
he  was  on  the  whole  the  most  fortunate, 
though  he,  like  the  rest,  underwent  many  hard- 
ships. Getting  a  medical  degree  at  Avignon 
in  1596,  he  followed  serious  courses,  publish- 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  109 

ing  a  translation  of  Josephus  in  1602,  a  Treatise 
of  the  Plague  in  1603,  and  a  translation  of 
Seneca  in  1614  ;  and  lived  till  1625,  having 
long  survived  the  Bohemian  playwright- 
comrades  of  his  youth. 

On  the  strength  of  his  signed  dramatic 
work  he  counts  for  little  ;  but  if  he  were  the 
author  of  the  Troublesome  Raigne,  and  also, 
as  there  is  some  reason  to  think,  joint  author 
with  Kyd  of  the  old  King  Leir  and  his  Three 
Daughters  J  written  between  1592  and  1594  ; 
and  still  more  if  he  be  the  author  of  A  Warning 
for  Fair  Women,  he  played  an  important  part 
in  the  rapid  evolution  which  we  have  already 
in  part  followed.  Marius  and  Sylla  is  strenu- 
ously monotonous  in  key,  and  in  diction 
Marlowesque,  rhetorical,  conventional,  in- 
clining more  to  the  French  than  to  the  native 
models ;  while  its  comic  scenes  are  gross 
anachronisms.  The  Looking  Glass,  again,  is 
withheld  by  its  pseudo-Biblical  framework 
from  homogeneous  truth.  But  the  Trouble- 
some Baigne  has  plenty  of  primitive  vigour ; 
King  Leir,  albeit  utterly  transcended  by 
Shakespeare's  entirely  individual  handling  of 
the  same  theme,  is  no  mean  prelude  to  that ; 
and  the  Warning  for  Fair  Women  (1594  or 
later)  is  only  less  notable  as  an  essay  in 
realism  than  Arden,  which  indeed  it  so  re- 
sembles in  theme  as  to  raise  question  whether 
it  be  not  from  the  same  hand. 

Upon  many  such  questions  of  authorship 


110      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

we  are  still  in  uncertainty,  and  there  has  been 
much  futile  guess-work ;  but  the  method  of 
critical  analysis  which  definitely  assigns  Arden 
to  Kyd  will  probably  one  day  clear  up  many 
other  problems.  Of  the  Warning,  and  of 
another  play  which  has  been  conjecturally 
connected  with  Lodge,  the  ^Larum  for  London 
(1599),  we  can  but  say  that  they  show  the 
same  progression  from  conventional  to  crea- 
tive art,  from  pseudo-classicism  to  realism, 
as  is  to  be  noted  in  the  work  of  Marlowe,  Kyd, 
and  Greene.  The  Warning  is  written  in  simple 
and  mostly  pedestrian  blank  verse,  taking  the 
way  of  Kyd,  and  presenting  a  tragedy  of  lust 
and  crime  on  the  levels  of  London  bourgeois 
life,  closely  following,  as  does  Arden,  the  re- 
cords of  an  actual  murder  trial.  The  Induc- 
tion, which  suggests  another  hand,  is  a  protest 
against  the  tragedy  of  slaughterous  tyrants 
and  avenging  ghosts,  very  much  in  the  spirit 
of  Jonson's  Prologue  to  his  Every  Man  in  his 
Humour,  produced  in  the  previous  year.  "  I 
must  have  passions  that  must  move  the  soul," 
says  Tragedy,  whipping  History  and  Comedy 
off  the  stage  ;  and  the  cold,  hard  tale  of  vicious 
folly,  craft,  and  murder  goes  deliberately 
on  to  the  finale  of  retribution.  The  action 
aims  at  producing  illusion  by  rigorous  veri- 
similitude of  detail.  Such  plays  could  give 
small  pretext  for  the  charge  of  immorality 
against  the  stage  :  sin  is  tracked  and  doomed 
with  the  grimmest  moral  purpose  ;   and  tales 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  111 

were  told  in  this  connexion — as  in  Hamlet — 
of  how  guilty  creatures  before  such  spectacles 
were  driven  to  confession  and  the  payment 
of  the  last  penalty.  Shakespeare,  always  a 
poet,  was  not  to  take  the  realistic  way  in 
tragedy ;  but  such  plays  as  this,  written  for 
his  company,  influenced  him  in  his  work ; 
and  verbal  echoes  of  the  Waniing^  in  which  he 
may  actually  have  played,  occur  in  Macbeth. 

The  ^Larum  for  London,  by  whomsoever 
written,  shows  rather  more  poetic  power  than 
any  other  play  ascribed  to  Lodge ;  and  it  is 
impossible  to  be  sure  that  the  vigorous  verse 
is  not  in  part  from  the  hand  of  Marlo^^'^e, 
which,  if  not  present,  is  certainly  imitated. 
The  "  moral  "  of  the  play,  the  need  for  proper 
provision  for  men  who  have  served  their 
country  as  soldiers,  is  one  affirmed  by  him ; 
and  the  siege  of  Antwerp,  which  the  play  pre- 
sents, is  one  which  we  know  to  have  interested 
him. 

Little  of  the  other  surviving  work  of  the 
group  of  pre-Shakespeareans  remains  memor- 
able ;  but  to  that  group  we  must  assign 
the  important  credit  of  having  evolved  the 
chronicle-play,  in  the  revision  and  adaptation 
of  which  Shakespeare  did  some  of  his  first 
dramatic  task- work.  The  three  plays  on  the 
reign  of  Henry  VI,  published  with  his  in  1623, 
are  certainly  but  adaptations  of  previous 
plays  in  which  Marlowe,  Peele,  and  Greene,  ' 
and  possibly  Kyd,  Drayton,  and  Lodge,  coUa- 


112      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

borated  ;  and  1  Henry  VI  seems  to  be  mainly 
the  work  of  the  first  three,  with,  it  would  seem, 
additions  by  Drayton.  The  opening  lines 
have  the  sign  manual  of  Marlowe.  One 
eminent  authority  has  inclined  to  assign  to 
Shakespeare  the  '^  Roses  "  scene,  and  another 
the  Talbot  scenes  in  the  fourth  act.  But  the 
Roses  scene,  with  its  notably  high  percentage 
of  verses  with  double-endings,  is  much  more 
likely  to  have  been  the  late  work  of  Marlowe  ; 
and  the  Talbot  scenes  carry  no  suggestion  of 
the  style  of  Shakespeare,  though  we  cannot 
tell  how  far  he  may  have  intervened  as  reviser. 
An  alternative  hypothesis  assigns  the  Talbot 
scenes  to  Drayton — a  much  more  likely  solu- 
tion. The  odious  presentment  of  Joan  of 
Arc  cannot  conceivably  be  Shakespeare's,  but 
it  is  only  too  likely  to  be  Peele's  ;  and  Mar- 
garet, in  this  and  the  later  plays,  often  sug- 
gests the  hand  of  Greene.  In  Richard  III 
there  appears  to  be  mvich  of  the  work  of  Mar- 
lowe and  Greene,  with  notable  verbal  traces 
of  Kyd  ;  and  the  crude  vigour  of  Richard's 
self-description  belongs  to  Marlowe  alike  in 
style  and  conception.  This  play  we  know 
exhibits  a  multitude  of  divergences  as  between 
the  Quarto  of  1597  and  the  Folio  of  1623  ; 
but  there  are  insuperable  objections  to  the 
view  that  the  differences  in  the  later  version, 
even  when  they  are  improvements,  stand  for 
corrections  made  by  Shakespeare.  They  are 
often  demonstrably  the  work  of  one  who  had 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  113 

not  understood  the  original  text ;  and  the 
long  passages  in  the  Folio  which  are  lacking 
in  the  Quarto  are  evidently  not  additions  but 
portions  of  the  prior  text  which  had  been 
excluded  from  an  acting  copy  by  way  of  stage 
curtailment.  With  these  restored,  the  Quarto 
gives  substantially  the  true  text,  and  it  can- 
not be  all  Shakespeare's.  It  is  not  credible 
that  he  made  the  ghost  of  Henry  VI  say  to 
Richard : 

When  I  was  mortal,  my  anointed  body 
By  thee  was  punched  full  of  deadly  holes. 

Even  in  Henry  V  there  is  some  ground  for 
misgiving  as  to  authorship.     The  foolish  line  : 

Now  set  the  teeth  and  stretch  the  nostril  wide, 

if  it  be  Shakespeare's,  is  the  worst  he  ever 
wrote;  and  inasmuch  as  the  choruses  are 
noticeably  unlike  his  style,  but,  like  the 
admittedly  non-Shakespearean  prologue  to 
Troilus  and  Cressida,  closely  resemble  that  of 
the  prologues  of  Dekker,  it  may  be  that  in 
this  play  also  we  have  some  work  of  other 
men.  It  would  be  satisfactory  to  be  able  to 
believe  as  much  with  regard  to  the  gross 
savagery  of  Henry's  speech  in  Act  III,  Scene  3. 
Not  the  least  effective  of  the  old  chronicle 
series  is  The  Troublesome  Raigne  of  King 
John,  anonymously  published  in  1591,  but 
probably  written,  as  aforesaid,   by  Thomas 

8 


114      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Lodge.  Of  all  the  early  model-plays  in  the 
case  of  which  we  are  able  to  compare  an 
original  with  Shakespeare's  reworking,  this 
best  bears  the  comparison  ;  and  it  is  pro- 
bably to  the  inspiration  of  Marlowe  that  it  owes 
its  strongest  features,  Shakespeare  does  but 
refine  and  invigorate  the  portraiture  and  the 
plot,  removing  as  he  always  did  the  more 
fanatical  features.  An  interesting  hint  as 
to  the  procedure  of  recomposition,  however, 
lies  in  the  herald's  speeches  in  the  second  act. 
In  the  old  play,  these  are  in  prose ;  in 
Shakespeare's  they  are  in  verse ;  and  the 
verse  is  clearly  not  Shakespeare's.  Evidently 
there  were  possibilities  of  the  intervention  of 
minor  hands. 

The  importance  of  the  early  chronicle 
ip^ays  lies  not  so  much  in  their  literary  merit, 
Ijwhich,  on  the  whole,  is  not  high,  as  in  their 
I  function  of  effecting  the  transition  from 
academic  to  what  we  may  term  "  humanist  " 
tragedy.  At  one  end  of  the  evolution  comes 
Ferrex  and  Porrex ;  at  the  other  end  lie 
Faustus  and  Othello^  Lear^  and  Antony  and 
Cleopatra.  It  was  by  way  of  the  presentment 
pf  modern  historical  characters,  partly  limned 
in  the  light  of  recent  history,  that  drama 
moved  from  pseudo-classic  rhetoric  and  non- 
action to  the  free  play  of  life,  whether  of  his- 
tory, legend,  fiction,  or  criminal  trial.  And 
the  freedom  to  do  this  was  part  of  the  gain 
from  the  clean  sweep  made  in  English  public 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  115 

life  by  the  rise  of  the  Tudor  dynasty  and  the 
further  cljearing^way^o  past  at  and  after 

the  Reformation.  The  personal  (not  econ- 
nomicy  prbtecticn  given  to  the  player  com- 
panies by  the  nobles  who  nominally  employed 
them,  was  the  remaining  requisite  for  a 
free  dramatic  handling  of  history.  Had  th^ 
French  stage  had  similar  liberty  to  deal  with 
the  near  historic  past  it  might  have  evolved 
a  more  realistic  tragedy  which  should  have 
escaped  the  academic  reaction  typified  in 
Corneille.  But  the  political  conditions  in 
the  two  countries  were  vitally  different.  In 
both,  recent  home  history  was  alike  taboo ; 
and  not  till  the  reign  of  James  could  English 
playwrights  touch  even  remotely  on  the 
tragic  record  of  the  ghastly  house  of  Tudor, 
the  father  with  his  bloodstained  hands,  the 
daughters  born  of  mothers  dishonoured  or 
slain.  But  plays  which  gibbeted  Richard 
Crookback  were  pleasant  enough  to  Tudor 
ears  ;  the  fuller  treatment  of  the  wars  of  York 
and  Lancaster  naturally  followed ;  patriotic 
and  Protestant  sentiment  in  turn  welcomed 
the  chronicles  in  which  the  first  and  third 
Edwards  and  Henry  V  played  the  hero-king  ; 
and  even  the  dubious  King  John  could  be 
made  to  figure  as  the  champion  of  English 
liberty  against  the  Pope.  The  anger  of  the 
Court  at  the  revival  of  Richard  II  on  the 
occasion  of  the  Essex  conspiracy  showed  the 
danger  which  might  upon  occasion  attach 


116      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

to  the  exploitation  of  history  ;  but  the  free 
field  was  large.  In JFrp-nce,,.tlie;  factor-^  the 
Church  alone  excluded  any  such  free  handling 
of  the  nation's  past :  if  the  people  had  been 
ready  to  pedestal  Joan  of  Arc,  the  Church 
would  not  have  allowed  it. 

It  would  be  a  great  mistake  to  suppose 
that  the  mere  play  of  patriotism  in  England 
was  the  inspiring  force  in  the  vitalizing  of  the 
serious  drama.  The  chronicle  plays,  as  we 
have  seen,  were  not  as  a  whole  great  work; 
and  what  is  best  in  them  has  least  to  do  with 
patriotism.  The  notable  part  of  Edward 
III  is  entirely  outside  the  historic  action  ; 
the  strongest  play  of  all,  Edward  11,  like 
Richard  11,  presents  a  humiliated  king,  of 
whom  the  nation  was  ashamed  ;  and  in  later 
history  the  ground  is  chiefly  occupied  with 
the  Henry  VI  trilogy  and  Richard  III,  in 
which  the  themes  are  national  defeat,  regal 
wickedness,  and  civil  war.  Patriotic  fervour 
is  not  the  inspiration  of  great  drama.  What 
the  chronicle  play  really  did  was  to  conduct 
the  stage  by  the  line  of  least  resistance  to 
poetic  realism  in  drama,  the  distinctive  excel- 
lence of  Elizabethan  literature,  which  at  this 
point  is  epoch-making  for  the  world.  It  was 
the  chronicle  play,  represented  at  nearly  its 
moral  worst  by  Peele's  Edward  I  and  the 
Pucelle  scenes  of  1  Henry  VI,  that  made  pos- 
sible Romeo  and  Juliet,  of  which  Peele  was 
probably  one  of  the  draughtsmen. 


THE  PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN  DRAMA  117 

All  along,  at  its  best  and  at  its  worst  alike, 
the  growth  proceeded  under  a  constant  fire 
of  social  hostility.  The  Elizabethan  age  is 
not  any  more  than  others  to  be  thought  of  at 
any  time  as  one  of  homogeneous  national  life : 
it  was  rather  a  perpetual  clash  of  antagonistic 
forces,  Protestant  against  Catholic,  Pres- 
byterian against  Prelatist,  England  against 
Ireland,  Court  clique  against  Court  clique, 
Puritan  and  poet  against  popular  playmakers, 
and  playwright  against  playwright.  No  invec- 
tive was  fiercer  or  more  continuous  than  that 
continuously  poured  out  against  all  manner 
of  stage-plays  by  pious  and  other  moralists 
down  to  the  period  when,  under  the  Common- 
wealth, the  theatres  were  closed.  Spenser 
and  Sidney  in  the  pre-Shakespearean  days  gave 
it  small  welcome  ;  and  Bacon  later  showed 
it  no  more  favour.  Its  vitality  was  thus 
native,  alike  on  the  economic  and  the  artistic 
side  ;  and  its  leafage  was  that  of  the  tree 
which  grows  strong  by  battling  with  the  winds. 

CHAPTER   VI 

THE   GREAT   PROSE 

Drayton,  retrospectively  scolding  Lilly  and 
the  Euphuists  in  his  old  age,  speaks  of  them  as 

Talking  of  Stones,  Stars,  Plants,  of  Fishes,  Flies, 
Playing  with  words  and  idle  similes  ; 
As  the  English  Apes  and  very  Zanies  be 
Of  everytliing  that  they  do  hear  and  see, 


118     ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

So  imitating  his  ridiculous  tricks. 

They  spake  and  writ,  all  hke  mere  lunatiques. 

And  it  is  to  Sidney,  "  that  heroe  for  numbers 
and  for  prose,"  that  he  gives  the  credit  of 
having  "  reduced  "  our  tongue  from  Euphu- 
ism, and 

throughly  pac'd  our  language  as  to  show 
That  plenteous  English  hand  in  hand  might  go 
With  Greek  and  Latin. 

The  praise  seems  to  be  strictly  just,  though 
Drayton  does  not  go  into  any  detail. 

It  was  not,  however,  by  his  most  popular 
work  that  Sidney  did  his  best  service  to 
English  prose.  The  famous  Arcadia^  like 
nearly  every  other  new  departure  in  Tudor 
literature,  was  produced  by  a  foreign  stimu- 
lus :  in  this  case,  contact  with  the  old  Greek 
romance  of  Heliodorus,  entitled  The  Ethiopic 
History.  Underdown's  English  version  of 
that  work  was  first  published  about  1569  ; 
and  about  1580  Sidney  was  at  work  upon  his 
own  romance.  His  praise  of  Heliodorus  in 
the  Apology  for  Poetry  is  proof  that  he  had 
read  him ;  but  the  fact  might  have  been 
known  from  the  first  chapter  of  the  Arcadia, 
so  closely  does  it  imitate  the  narrative 
method  of  the  ancient  novelist.  This  was  not 
the  way  to  attain  either  vitality  in  story- 
telling or  strength  of  style  ;  and  the  Arcadia, 
with  all  its  artificial  charm,  exhibits  neither. 
The  opening   sentence   has   145   words,   the 


THE  GREAT  PROSE  119 

second  203  ;  and  both  are  shambling,  shape- 
less, and  devoid  of  balance.  Further,  they 
are  tainted  with  Euphuism,  and  with  some- 
thing worse  :  witness  the  phrases  :  "  Where 
we  last  (alas  that  the  word  last  should  so  long 
last)  did  gaze  "  [^i  grace  or  graze]  "our  eyes  upon 
her  ever -flourishing  beauty."  After  this  one 
feels  that  the  good  sentences  are  windfalls  ; 
and  that  the  writer,  however  gifted,  was  on 
this  side  immature. 

Nor  does  Sidney  show  any  original  faculty 
for  prose — or  even  a  keen  eye  for  normal 
construction — in  his  portion  of  the  transla- 
tion of  the  French  treatise  De  la  VeritS  de  la 
Religion  chrestienne  of  his  friend  De  Mornay 
— a  task  which  he  bega  ,  but  had  to  leave  to 
his  friend,  Arthur  Golding,  to  finish  (1587), 
The  opening  sentence  runs  : 

Such  as  make  profession  to  teach  us,  do  say  they 
never  find  less  what  to  say  than  when  the  thing  which 
they  treat  of  is  more  manifest  and  more  known  of 
itself  than  all  that  can  be  alleged  for  the  setting  forth 
thereof. 

It  faithfully  follows  the  original.  Golding, 
had  he  had  any  natural  gift,  might  have 
acquired  a  prose  style  from  Calvin,  many  of 
whose  volumes  he  translated  into  English, 
thereby  helping  to  affect  the  development  of 
English  prose  anew  as  it  had  been  affected 
fifty  years  before  by  the  early  Protestant 
controversy.  Calvin  was  a  great  prose  writer  : 
the  voluble  De  Mornay  was  not,  and  Sidney 


120      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

probably  learned  little  from  translating  him. 
He  was  to  become  a  masterly  writer  by 
following  once  more  his  own  precept  to  him- 
self for  poetry :  "  Look  in  thy  heart  and 
write." 

It  is  in  the  posthumous  Apology  for  Poetry, 
published  nine  years  after  his  death,  that  he 
'' reduces ''English  prose  from  insincerity 
aiiSTconvention  to  a  masculine  sini£licity  and 
strength.  The  theme' was  one  on  which  he 
mtrstElready  have  thought  and  felt  much  ; 
and  when  the  brawling  Stephen  Gosson,  re- 
penting of  his  own  unsuccessful  work  as  a 
playwright,  published  his  School  of  Abuse 
(1579)  in  denunciation  alike  of  plays  and 
poetry,  with  an  unwarranted  dedication  to 
the  young  aristocrat  who  was  already  writing 
sonnets  to  Stella,  the  inscription  was  unwel- 
come. Sidney  let  two  years  pass  before  writ- 
ing his  essay,  variously  entitled  a  Defence 
of  Poesy  and  an  Apology  for  Poetrie  ;  and 
the  result  of  his  deliberation--wasL_  the  most  / 
fijoished^nd  dis^^  "  /\ 

prose  that  had  yet  been  produced  in  English. 
Here  there  is  none  of  the  nervous  haste  and 
loquacity  of  the  Arcadia  :    the  essay  begins, 
as  it  ends,  on  a  note  of  quiet  humour  :   the 
sentences,  with  rare  exceptions,  are  at  once     / 
fluent  and  controlled,  easeful  and  balanced  ;  nc 
the  construction  close,  and  the  diction  pure.       / 
Above  all,  the  thought  is  fresh,  and  vital  even   V 
where  it  is  not  scientifically  valid.     The  bane  / ' 


THE   GREAT  PROSE  121 

of  serious  secular  literature  thus  far  had 
been  platitude  :  only  in  1580  had  Montaigne's 
Essais  begun  the  modern  era  of  untrammelled 
"  criticism  of  life  "  ;  and  English  readers,  not 
surfeited  with  Euphues,  were  still  capable  of 
assimilating  repeated  issues  of  translations  of 
the  Golden  Epistles  (1575,  1582)  and  the 
Familiar  Epistles  (1574)  of  the  interminable 
Guevara.  It  was  a  new  experience  for  them, 
even  in  1595,  to  meet  in  their  own  tongue 
with  such  prose  and  such  thinking  as  this  of 
Sidney's  : 

The  Physician  weigheth  the  nature  of  a  man's  body, 
and  the  nature  of  things  helpful  or  hurtful  unto  it. 
And  the  Metaphysick  [=  metaphysician],  though  it  be 
in  the  second  and  abstract  notions,  and  therefore  be 
counted  supernatural,  yet  doth  he  build  upon  the 
depth  of  Nature  :  only  the  Poet,  disdaining  to  be  tied 
to  any  such  subjection,  lifted  up  with  the  vigour  of 
his  own  invention,  doth  grow  in  effect  another  nature, 
in  making  things  either  better  than  Nature  bringeth 
forth,  or,  quite  anew,  forms  such  as  never  were  in 
Nature,  as  the  Heroes,  Demigods  and  Cyclops, 
Chimeras,  Furies,  and  such  like  :  so  as  he  goeth  hand 
in  hand  with  Nature,  not  enclosed  within  the  narrow 
warrant  of  her  gifts,  but  freely  ranging  only  within 
the  Zodiac  of  his  own  wit. 

Nature  never  set  forth  the  earth  in  so  rich  tapestry 
as  divers  Poets  have  done  ;  neither  with  pleasant 
rivers,  fruitful  trees,  sweet-smelling  flowers:  nor 
whatsoever  else  may  make  the  too  much  loved  earth 
more  lovely.  Her  world  is  brazen  :  the  Poets  only 
deliver  a  golden.  .  .  . 

This  is  greater  prose   than  anything  in  the 


122      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

Arcadia :  greater  literature  than  most  of 
Sidney's  verse.  And  it  comes  to  print  in  the 
great  decade  of  EUzabethan  prose. 

The  Hterary  value  of  Sidney's  Apology  is 
best  realized  by  comparing  it  with  the  Defence 
of  Poetry,  Music,  and  Stage  Plays  previously 
written  by  Thomas  Lodge  (1580),  in  direct 
and  controversial  reply  to  Gosson.  Lodge 
also  was  a  scholar  and  a  poet,  with  a  notaole 
facility  in  verse  ;  but  in  no  respect  does  his 
performance  approach  to  any  rivalry  with 
Sidney's.  It  is  written  in  headlong  haste,  on 
the  first  provocation  of  resentment,  and  with 
no  thought  of  psychic  or  logical  construction. 
Lodge  leaps  forth  to  taunt  and  counter-rail 
the  railer,  and  does  it  with  all  the  EUzabethan 
volubility  and  simplicity  of  dialectic,  largely 
by  way  of  a  multitude  of  queries.  "  What 
made  Africanus  esteem  Ennius  ?  Why  did 
Alexander  give  praise  to  Achilles,  but  for  the 
praises  he  found  written  of  him  in  Homer  ? 
Why  esteemed  Pompey  so  much  of  Theophanes 
Mitiletus  ?  or  Brutus  so  greatly  the  writings 
of  Accius  ?  "  He  has  plenty  of  learning,  and 
is  often  rapturous  in  his  passion  for  the 
Muses.  "  I  wish  you,"  he  cries,  ''  to  account 
well  of  this  heavenly  concent,  which  is  full 
of  perfection  proceeding  from  above,  drawing 
his  original  from  the  motion  of  the  stars,  from 
the  agreement  of  the  planets,  from  the 
whistling  winds,  and  from  all  those  celestial 
circles  where  is  either  perfect  agreement  or 


-/^ 


THE  GREAT  PROSE  123 

any  Symphonia.^^  But  the  prose  is  breath- 
less and  the  syntax  elementary — a  mere 
hasty  heaping-up  of  clauses,  without  composi- 
tion. Lodge,  in  virtue  of  his  zest  and  energy, 
figured  more  or  less  creditably  in  a  multitude 
of  literary  forms  ;  but  to  the  great  art  of  prose 
he  contributed  nothing. 

It  would  seem  that  temperament  counted 
for  more  than  literary  training.  The  Apologie 
had  been  preceded  by  a  briefer  and  less  gra- 
cious, but  still  a  notable  masterpiece,  lengthily 
entitled  A  Report  of  the  Truth  of  the  Fight  about 
the  Isles  of  the  Acores,  this  last  Summer^  betwixt 
the  Revenge,  one  of  her  Majesties  Shippes,  and 
an  Armada  of  the  King  of  Spaine  (1591). 
This  was  the  work  of  Raleigh,  another  of  the 
masters  of  prose.  It  was  followed,  four  years 
later,  by  a  poem  from  Jervase  Markham,  The 
Most  Honorable  Tragedie  of  Sir  Richard 
Grinvile,  Knight,  written,  to  use  a  phrase  of 
its  author,  "  with  over-labouring  toil."  The 
poem  is  in  every  respect  inferior  to  the  prose 
Report,  which  makes  its  unique  effect  by  a 
grave  and  effortless  simplicity.  Even  its  long 
sentences  keep  their  balance.  The  preliminary 
vaunt  over  the  defeat  of  the  Armada,  put 
forth  by  way  of  retort  to  Spanish  boasts,  is 
done  with  a  stern  exactness  of  detail,  and  with 
hardly  a  touch  of  rhetoric  ;  and  the  story  of 
the  tremendous  fight  of  the  Revenge  is  told 
with  a  calm  intensity  that  transcends  declama- 
tion.    It  is  to  be  feared  that  there  is  some 


(124      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

exaggeration  in  the  figures  and  in  the  measure 
of  the  damage  to  the  Revenge,  for  she  re- 
mained navigable ;  and  the  contemporary 
account  of  Linschoten,  who  tells  of  Grenville's 
savageries  in  the  way  of  chewing  glass,  speaks 
of  only  seven  or  eight  Spanish  ships  as  board- 
ing the  Englishman.  But  there  is  no  exag- 
geration in  the  style : 

All  the  powder  of  the  Revenge  to  the  last  barrel 
was  now  spent,  all  her  pikes  broken,  forty  of  her  best 
men  slain,  and  the  most  part  of  the  rest  hurt.  In  the 
beginning  of  the  fight  she  had  but  one  hundreth  free 
from  siclmess,  and  fourscore  and  ten  sick,  laid  in  hold 
upon  the  ballast.  A  small  troop  of  men  to  such  a 
ship,  and  a  weak  garrison  to  resist  so  mighty  an  army. 
By  those  him.dred  all  was  sustained,  the  volleys, 
boardings,  and  entrings  of  fifteen  ships  of  war,  besides 
those  which  beat  her  at  large.  On  the  contrary,  the 
Spanish  were  always  supplied  with  soldiers  brought 
from  every  squadron ;  all  manner  of  arms,  and 
powder  at  will.  Unto  ours  there  remained  no  comfort 
at  all,  no  hope,  no  supply  either  of  ships,  men,  or 
weapons  ;  the  masts  all  beaten  overboard,  all  her 
tackle  cut  asunder,  her  upper  work  altogether  razed  ; 
and  in  effect  evened  she  was  with  the  water — ^but  the 
very  foundation  or  bottom  of  a  ship,  nothing  being 
left  overhead  either  for  flight  or  defence. 

Markham  in  comparison  is  turgid,  blatant, 
and  sometimes  ridiculous : 

But  poor  Revenge,  less  rich,  and  not  so  great. 
Answered  her  cuff  for  cuff,  and  threat  for  threat. 

Prose  had  come  into  her  own.  It  is  note- 
woi-thy  that  these  prize-pieces  are  penned  by 


/ 


THE   GREAT  PROSE  125 

cultured  men  of  action,  who  partly  found  the 
secret  of  distinction  in  the  school  of  life,  in 
camps  and  courts.  Poets,  scholars,  fighters, 
thinkers,  they  made  for  themselves  at  length 
a  prose  fit  to  affirm  their  most  earnest  thought ; 
and  Raleigh's  Preface  to  his  History  of  the 
World  shows  him  to  have  gone  as  far  into 
philosophy  as  almost  any  man  of  his  genera- 
tion. Sidney  passed  away  in  the  splendid 
morning  of  his  life  :  Raleigh,  living  through  a 
tempestuous  day  to  a  tragic  night,  collects 
himself  at  the  close  of  his  long  and  generally 
pedestrian  prison-task.  The  History  of  the 
World,  and  takes  leave  of  life  with  a  superb 
gesture : 

O  eloquent,  just  and  mighty  death  !  whom  none 
could  advise,  thou  hast  persuaded  ;  what  none  hath 
dared,  thou  hast  done  ;  and  whom  all  the  world  hath 
flattered,  thou  only  hast  cast  out  of  the  world  and 
despised  :  thou  hast  drawn  together  all  the  pride, 
cruelty,  and  ambition  of  man,  and  covered  it  all  over 
with  these  two  narrow  words.  Hie  jacet, 

J  This,  like  Sidney's,  is  prose  raised  to  the  plane 
(^  of  fine  art :  Raleigh's  best  verses,  among 
which  we  may  rank  those  on  the  samt  theme, 
have  not  more  gift  of  duration.  Perhaps  the 
most  truly  artistic  writing  of  the  same  period, 
as  it  happens,  is  that  produced  by  one  of  the 
new  tribe  of  writers  who  lived  by  their  pens. 
It  was  drama  that  first  made  their  way  of  life 
possible,  in  England  as  in  Italy ;  and  it  is 
alongside  of  the  Marlowe  group  that  we  first 


126      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

find  one  who  puts  out  most  of  his  effort  in 
prose.  Nashe  had  no  success  in  drama  ;  and 
no  real  gift  for  verse  ;  but  in  prose  he  reveals 
a  faculty  which  could  stamp  distinction  upon 
scurrility,  and  compass  beauty  of  rhythm  in 
a  treatise  penned  either  for  writing's  sake  or 
for  gain.  His  first  essay.  The  Anatomy  of 
Absurdity  (1589),  is  too  strained  and  breath- 
less to  be  rhythmical,  and  is  touched  with 
Euphuism,  though  Nashe  afterwards  denied 
it,  protesting  that  he  had  never  employed  the 
vocabulary  of  stones  and  beasts.  His  anti- 
Martinist  writings,  too,  early  and  late,  are 
not  enjoyable.  But  in  Pierce  Penilesse  his 
Supplication  to  the  Divell  (1592)  he  has  attained 
at  once  the  command  of  his  rich  native  humour 
and  the  singular  opulence  and  elasticity  of 
construction  in  which  he  surpasses  every 
writer  of  his  day.  Nashe  gives  the  impres- 
sion of  a  singer  who  cannot  lose  breath.  Eis 
clauses  are  not  merely  juxtaposed  :  they  are 
interfluent ;  and  his  flow  is  inexhaustible 
whether  he  is  grave  or  gay  : 

All  malcontent  sits  the  greasy  son  of  a  clothier, 
and  complains  (like  a  decayed  earl)  of  the  ruin  of 
ancient  houses  ;  whereas  the  weavers'  looms  first 
framed  the  web  of  his  honour,  and  the  locks  of  wool 
that  bushes  and  brambles  have  took  toll  of  insolent 
sheep  that  would  needs  strive  for  the  wall  of  a  fir- 
bush,  have  made  him  of  the  tenths  of  their  tar  a 
squire  of  low  degree ;  and  of  the  collections  of  their 
scatterlings  a  Justice,  tarn  Marti  quam  Mercurio,  of 
Peace  and  of  Coram. 


THE   GREAT   PROSE  127 

Gabriel  Harvey  was  a  good  scholar  and  a 
man  of  capacity,  despite  his  efforts  to  per- 
suade Spenser  to  write  English  verse  in 
quantitative  classical  measures  ;  but  in  his 
wrangles  with  Nashe  he  is  simply  over- 
whelmed by  an  adversary  who  could  have 
out-railed  Thersites  and  out-rallied  Falstaff. 
When  Nashe  becomes  serious  his  style  sub- 
sides to  a  restful  rhythm,  which,  in  the  half- 
superstitious,  half-whimsical  Terrors  of  the 
Night  (1594),  anticipates  in  no  small  degree 

^e^£erfecl.i£adeJ!:ie§^«^LSk^J^^ 
He  is  neither  thinker  nor  poet :  prose  is  his 
true  medium,  and  he  talks  because  he  must. 
What  he  lacks  is  sufficiency  of  message.  Had 
Nashe  ever  been  possessed  by  a  great  pur- 
pose, or  cared  to  pursue  sheer  beauty  of 
diction,  he  could  have  made  a  finer  music 
than  any  of  that  age.  As  it  is,  in  his  Christs 
Teares  over  Jerusalem  (1593),  preaching  peni- 
tence in  plague-time  and  professing  to  put 
craftsmanship  far  from  him,  he  is  instinctively 
harmonious,  endlessly  fertile  in  phrase  and 
trope. 

But  the  true  Nashe  is  best  to  be  savoured 
from  his  Lenten  Stuffe,  otherwise  The  Praise 
of  the  Red  Herring  (1599),  where  the  avowed 
business  of  book-making  is  conducted  with 
a  full-handed  wealth  of  humour  and  fancy 
which  constantly  recalls  the  different  abun- 
dance of  Shakespeare.  Critics  dwell  upon  his 
wilful  Rabelaisian  minting  of  "  huge  words," 


128     ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

which  he  brazenly  justifies  on  the  score  that 
English  runs  unduly  to  monosyllables  ;  but 
that  is  merely  the  supererogation  of  the 
humorist.  Over  the  Red  Herring  he  can 
expatiate  as  Mercutio  on  Queen  Mab  :  any 
theme  will  serve  for  this  prince  of  improvi- 
sators.    As  he  puts  it : 

Every  man  can  say  bee  to  a  battledore,  and  write 
in  praise  of  virtue  and  the  seven  liberal  sciences,  thresh 
com  out  of  the  full  sheaves  and  fetch  water  from  the 
Thames  ;  but  out  of  dry  stubble  to  make  an  after 
harvest,  and  a  plentiful  crop  without  sowing,  and 
wring  juice  out  of  a  flint,  that's  Pierce  a  God's  name, 
and  the  right  trick  of  a  workman. 

It  is  as  if  Falstaff  had  taken  to  earning  his 
living  by  his  pen  ;  with  a  power  of  ever- 
springing  prose  such  as  Shakespeare  did  not 
possess.  In  his  ten  years  of  writing  for  the 
booksellers,  living  from  hand  to  mouth  like 
the  wild  iDrotherhood  of  playmakers  with 
whom  he  mixed,  Nashe  passed  as  rapidly  and 
as  completely  from  apprenticeship  to  mastery 
in  his  mystery  as  any  of  them  all.  His  short 
and  heedless  life  was  after  all  spent  to  some 
purpose. 

Naturally,  it  was  through  a  very  different 
discipline  that  the  great  writers  of  grave  prose 
came  to  their  accomplishment.  In  that  field 
the  two  towering  names  of  those  last  dozen 
years  of  Elizabeth's  day  are  those  of  Hooker 
and  Bacon,  men  alike  greatly  charged  with 
unattainable  ideals  and  endowed  with  gifts 


THE   GREAT   PROSE  129 

of  utterance  commensurate  to  their  purposes. 
In  them  the  rapid  intellectual  ripening  which 
we  have  noted  in  so  many  belletrists  of  the 
time  is  revealed  in  a  pregnancy  of  thought 
which  has  no  parallel  in  Tudor  literature  of 
previous  generations,  with  the  unique  excep- 
tion of  More.  Down  till  the  last  twenty  years 
of  Elizabeth's  life,  prose  writing,  apart  from 
theological  controversy  and  chronicle,  is  in  the 
main  alternately  juvenile  and  platitudinous, 
even  as  poetry  is  experimental  or  conventional. 
Philosophy  in  the  strict  sense  could  not  be 
said  to  exist  in  native  form  ;  what  ranks  as 
moral  philosophy  was  little  more  than  a 
gathering  of  wise  saws  and  modern  instances  ; 
and  what  passed  for  criticism  of  life  was  a  more 
or  less  laboured  re-arrangement  of  old  mosaics. 
With  Hooker  and  Bacon  the  race  seems  to 
step  into  maturity  ;  the  faculty  of  speech 
keeping  pace  with  the  faculty  of  thought. 

Neither  indeed  was  a  full-fledged  philo- 
sopher in  either  the  ancient  or  the  modern 
sense,  both  having  rather  practical  than 
speculative  ends  in  view :  but  ethical  and 
political  philosophy,  deeply  meditated,  are 
among  the  great  disciplines  ;  and  Hooker, 
brooding  over  the  practically  insoluble  prob- 
lem of  sectarian  dissension,  attained  to  a 
grasp  of  rational  social  science  approached  thus 
far  by  no  modern  save  Bodin.  Some  of  the 
cardinal  ideas  of  Hobbes  and  Hume  are  drawn 
from  his  pages  ;  and  he  will  be  found  at  points 

9 


130      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

both  anticipating  Locke  and  countering  in 
advance  one  of  his  philosophical  makeshifts. 
Such  thinking  was  fit  inspiratiou  for  high 
prose,  given  a  high  ratiocinative  purpose ; 
and  Hooker,  who  had  visibly  read  much  of 
Calvin  as  well  as  of  other  theology,  early  and 
late,  writes  English  with  a  closeness  of  logical 
texture  no  less  masterly  than  his  management 
of  the  sesthetic  effects  of  rhythm  and  cadence. 
Some,  doubtless,  will  always  prefer  the  more 
lyric  flights  in  which  his  religious  tempera- 
ment, which  seems  to  function  almost  in- 
dependently of  the  rationalistic,  rises  to  a 
rapturous  eloquence.  Of  this  there  is  a  fine 
example  at  the  end  of  his  First  Sermon.  But 
those  who  are  interested  to  know  how  rich 
and  powerful  Elizabethan  prose  can  be,  how 
intellectually  satisfying  in  diction  and  how 
energetic  in  idiom,  will  always  turn  to  the 
Ecclesiastical  Polity.  The  temperaments  of 
Hooker  and  Hobbes  had  as  little  in  common 
as  might  be ;  but  they  are  peers  in  their 
perfect  literary  craftsmanship,  their  identifica- 
tion of  argument  with  style,  and  that  wealth 
of  undefiled  and  unconventionalized  English 
which  preserves  for  us  a  perfume  as  of  old 
winCc 

Bacon  add^^  to  English  even  a  richer  grace. 
In  the  lofty  fanaticism  of  his  mission  to 
regenerate  and  reconstruct  all  science — a 
task  for  which  he  had  no  adequate  scientific 
preparation — he  professed  to  disdain  the  pre- 


THE   GREAT   PROSE  131 

occupation  with  style  which  he  saw  hamper- 
ing the  thought  of  so  many  of  his  predeces- 
sors in  the  European  field  of  Renaissance 
physics  and  cosmosophy.  But,  fathered  and 
mothered  by  a  judge  and  a  scholarly  woman, 
and  brought  up  in  the  full  play  of  Elizabethan 
word-warfare  of  all  kinds,  he  was  a  literary 
artist  born  and  made.  His  literary  power 
in  fact  outgoes  his  scientific  competence ; 
and  only  that  power  and  the  intensity  of  his 
purpose  save  him  on  that  side  from  oblivion. 
But  where  he  applies  his  peculiar  gift  for 
criticism  and  analysis  of  men  and  polity, 
character  and  conduct  and  intellectual  pro- 
clivity, he  is  one  of  the  master  writers  of  his 
race.  The  Essays^  of  which  the  first  handful 
appeared  in  1598,  were  inspired  by  those  of 
Montaigne ;  but  Bacon  takes  absolutely  his 
own  way.  .^Th^^  ruling  tendencies  of  Mon^ 
taigne  are  jjiscursiveness  and  scl£:Xevelation  : 
those  of  Paeon  are  concision  and  objectivity. 
Slight  as  his  first  volume  is,  never  before  in 
English  had  so  much  matter  b^en  packed 
into  so  little  room,  so  many  themus  that  had 
been  buried  in  commonplace  lifted  to  new 
life.  Four-fifths  of  the  essays,  however, 
belong  to  the  reign  of  James  and  the  later 
years  of  Bacon's  life  ;  and  it  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  the  ten  essays  of  the  first  issue 
(printed  by  Bacon  only  under  the  pressure  of 
imminent  piracy),  weigh  little  as  against  the 
large  treasure  of  Montaigne. 


132      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

What  may  rightly  be  included  in  the  last 
Elizabethan  decade  is  the  Advancement  of 
Learning  (1603),  Bacon's  most  considerable 
treatise  in  English.  After  his  fall  he  was  to 
expand  it  into  a  bulky  treatise  in  Latin,  with 
seven  Books  added  to  the  original  two.  This 
resort  to  Latin,  on  the  double  motive  of  his 
need  to  seek  continental  readers  after  his 
official  disgrace,  and  his  real  but  strangely 
wrong  disbelief  in  the  permanence  of  litera- 
ture in  the  modern  tongues,  is  one  of  the 
chagrins  of  the  lover  of  English.  Bacon  t 
wrote  Latin  no  better  than  a  hundred  other  V 
men  ;  whereas  no  man  of  his  latter  day  could  ^  ^ 
write  English  as  he  did.  The  all-round  en- 
richment of  the  Essays  in  the  later  editions 
is  warrant  for  saying  that  if  he  had  been 
content  to  use  his  mother-tongue  for  all  his 
work,  he  would  have  produced  the  finest 
body  of  native  prose  that  ever  stood  to  one 
man's  credit.  The  extraordinary  intellectual 
brilliance  of  the  opening  book  of  the  Novum 
Organum^  which  shines  through  every  transla- 
tion, would  have  been  still  more  lustrous  in 
the  noble  English  in  which  he  could  have 
couched  it.  As  it  is,  we  can  but  note  the  irony 
of  fate  in  the  fact  that  he  put  into  English 
the  bulky  Sylva  Sylvarum  or  Natural  History^ 
a  farrago  of  obsolete  physics  and  obsolete 
physic,  which,  popular  for  some  generations, 
has  no  lasting  importance  whatever. 

Already  in  the  Advancement  Bacon  is  a 


THE   GREAT   PROSE  133 

master  of  spacious  no  less  than  of  sententious 
style.  Hooker  is  eloquent  under  stress  of 
religious  emotion  ;  Bacon  can  be  so  in  an 
intellectual  exposition,  his  diction  heightening 
and  his  cadence  expanding  to  a  rhythmic 
swell  that  arouses  more  of  the  sensations  of 
poetry  than  does  a  great  deal  of  Elizabethan 
verse.  Even  before  the  Advancement^  it 
would  seem,  he  had  written  the  Valerius 
Terminus,  one  of  a  number  of  preludes  and 
summaries  in  which  he  reached  out  towards 
his  "  Great  Instauration."  By  him  it  was  put 
aside,  and  only  upon  its  accidental  discovery 
was  it  published,  a  hundred  years  after  his 
death.  And  yet  here,  in  a  mere  unfinished 
draft,  we  have  some  of  the  stateliest  prose  in 
our  literature : 

The  dignity  of  this  end  (of  endowment  of  man's  life 
with  new  commodities)  appeareth  by  the  estimation 
that  antiquity  made  of  such  as  guided  thereunto. 
For  whereas  founders  of  States,  lawgivers,  extirpers 
of  tyrants,  fathers  of  the  people,  were  honoured  but 
with  the  titles  of  Worthies  or  Demigods,  inventors 
were  ever  consecrated  amongst  the  Gods  themselves. 
And  if  the  ordinary  ambitions  of  men  lead  them  to 
seek  the  amplification  of  their  power  in  their  coun- 
tries, and  a  better  ambition  than  that  hath  moved 
them  to  seek  the  ampHfication  of  the  power  of  their 
own  countries  amongst  other  nations,  better  again 
and  more  worthy  must  that  aspiring  be  which  seeketh 
the  amplification  of  the  power  and  kingdom  of  man- 
kind over  the  world  ;  the  rather  because  the  other  two 
prosecutions  are  ever  culpable  of  much  perturbation 
and  injustice  ;  but  this  is  a  work  truly  divine,  which 
Cometh  in  aura  leni,  without  noise  or  observation. 


134      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

They  err  who  ascribe  to  Bacon  a  "  cold  " 
nature.  In  the  normal  affections,  whether 
of  love  or  hate,  he  was  not  ardent,  but  his 
devotion  to  his  great  ideal  was  truly  a  passion. 
At  the  close  of  the  first  book  of  the  Advance- 
ment it  pulsates  into  as  high  a  strain  as  any 
singer's : 

Lastly,  leaving  the  vulgar  arguments  that  by  learn- 
ing man  excelleth  man  in  that  wherein  man  excelleth 
beasts  ;     that   by   learning   man   ascendeth   to    the 
heavens  and  their  motions,  where  in  body  he  cannot 
come  ;  and  the  like  ;    let  us  conclude  with  the  dignity 
and  excellency  of   knowledge  and   learning  in  that 
whereunto  man's  nature  doth  most  aspire  ;  which  is 
immortality  or  continuance ;    for  to   this   tendeth 
generation,  and  raising  of  houses  and  families  ;    to 
this  buildings,  foundations,  and  monuments  ;  to  this 
tendeth  the  desire  of  memory,  fame,  and  celebration  ; 
and  in  effect,  the  strength  of  all  other  human  desires. 
/We  see  then  how  far  the  monuments  of  wit  and  learn- 
/  ing  are  more  durable  than  the  monuments  of  power 
/    or  of  the  hands.     For  have  not  the  verses  of  Homer 
/     continued  twenty-five  hundred  years  or  more,  without 
I      the  loss  of  a  syllable  or  letter :    during  which  time 
I     infinite  palaces,  temples,  castles,  cities,  have  been 
\     decayed  and  demolished  ?     It  is  not  possible  to  have 
the  true  pictures  or  statues  of  Cyrus,  Alexander, 
Caesar,  no  nor  of  the  kings  or  great  personages  of 
much  later  years  ;   for  the  originals  cannot  last,  and 
copies  cannot  but  leese  of  the  life  and  truth.     But 
the  images  of  men's  wits  and  knowledges  remain  in 
books,  exempted  from  the  wrong  of  time  and  capable 
of  perpetual  renovation.     Neither  are  they  fitly  to 
be  called  images,  because  they  generate  still  and  cast 
their  seeds  in  the  minds  of  others,  provoking  and 
causing  infinite  actions  and  opinions  in  succeeding 
ages.     So  that  if  the  invention  of  the  ship  was  thought 


THE  GREAT  PROSE  135 

SO  noble,  which  carrieth  riches  and  commodities  from 
place  to  place,  and  consociateth  the  most  remote 
regions  in  participation  of  their  fruits,  how  much  more 
are  letters  to  be  magnified,  which  as  ships  pass  through 
the  vast  seas  of  time,  and  make  ages  so  distant  to 
participate  of  the  wisdom,  illuminations,  and  in- 
ventions, the  one  of  the  other  ? 

Neither  under  Elizabeth  nor  under  James 
were  there  many  Englishmen  capable  of  rising 
to  this  appeal.  Ben  Jonson,  with  his  quick 
response  to  all  intellectual  pressures,  declared 
the  greatness  of  the  fallen  Chancellor  even  as 
he  did  that  of  the  dead  Shakespeare  ;  but  it 
was  the  fate  of  England,  forlornly  foreseen 
by  Bacon,  to  drift  for  a  generation  through 
ecclesiastical  strifes  that  culminated  in  a  long 
civil  war,  rather  than  to  attempt  the  way  of 
scientific  research  to  which  he  prematurely 
beckoned  them.  He  was  thus  the  prophet 
of  times  to  come. 

And  thus  it  comes  about,  too,  that  we  are 
left  looking  back  to  the  Elizabethan  time  as 
to  one  of  a  rich  artistic  florescence,  not  main- 
tained through  the  generation  which  followed. 
Elizabeth's  reign  had  in  fact  been  a  time  of 
signal  receptiveness  to  foreign  influence,  for- 
tunately assimilated.     Bacon's  scientific  in- 
terests had  been  aroused  mainly  by  foreign 
treatises  in^  Lalin_^nd J3^±ke^generi^  critical    '^ 
reaction   against^^the^worship    of   Aristotle.     ^ 
The  new  drama  had  been  nourished  by  Italian     * 
and  Spanish  fiction  ;  the  new  poetry  inspired 
by  Italian  and  French  models  ;   and  the  new 


136      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

prose  owed  much  to  the  practice  of  transla- 
tion. In  the  year  1603,  along  with  Bacon's 
Advancement,  there  appeared  two  of  the 
greatest  performances  in  that  kind  thus  far 
seen  :  the  rendering  of  Plutarch's  M  or  alia  by 
Philemon  Holland,  and  that  of  Montaigne's 
Essays  by  John  Florio ;  alike  in  point  of 
content  and  style  the  most  readable  folios  of 
their  day.  Scores  of  translations  of  ancient 
classics  and  modern  histories  had  already 
appeared  ;  but  only  a  few  with  any  authentic 
charm.  Sir  Thomas  North's  version  of  Plu- 
tarch's Lives^  made  from  the  French  version 
of  Amyot,  is  the  best  known  of  these,  with 
its  strong  simplicity  of  old-world  phrase. 
That  of  two  Books  of  Herodotus  by  ''  B.  R." 
(1584),  and  Underdowne's  version  of  Helio- 
dorus,  are  in  different  degrees  racy  of  the 
native  speech  :  others,  such  as  Fenton's  trans- 
lation of  Guicciardini's  Italian  history  (1579), 
made  through  the  French,  are  decidedly  dry 
reading.  It  must  have  been  a  vigorous  ap- 
petite for  information  that  carried  Fenton's 
folio  of  nigh  twelve  hundred  pages  into  a 
second  edition  in  a  dozen  years.  Thomas 
Danett's  rendering  of  the  French  history  of 
Comines  (1596)  is  much  more  appetizing,  pro- 
ceeding as  it  does  upon  a  much  more  naive 
original,  and  couched  as  it  is  in  the  more  art- 
less style  of  1563,  when  Danett  first  framed  it. 
There  we  may  read  "  how  the  two  Kings  met 
and  sware  the  treaty  before  concluded  ;   and 


THE   GREAT  PROSE  137 

how  some  supposed  that  the  Holy  Ghost  came 
down  upon  the  King  of  England's  paviHon 
in  the  Ukeness  of  a  white  pigeon  "  ;  and  also 
more  edifying  matters.  Comines  had  a  real 
critical  stimulus  for  Elizabethans,  dating 
though  he  did  two  generations  back.  Danett's 
rendering  of  "  The  Conclusion  of  the  Author  " 
to  his  sixth  book,  which  ends  with  the  death 
of  Louis  XI,  is  quaintly  charming  : 

Now  see  here  a  great  number  of  personages  deadvin 
short  space,  who  travelled  [=  travailed]  so  mightily, 
and  endured  so  many  anguishes  and  sorrows  to 
purchase  honour  and  renoume,  whereby  they  abridged 
their  lives,  yea  and  peradventure  charged  their  souls. 
I  speak  not  this  of  the  Turk  ;  for  I  make  account  he 
is  lodged  with  his  predecessors  [i.e.  in  bale]  ;  but  our 
ICing  and  the  rest,  I  trust,  God  hath  taken  to  his 
mercy.  Now,  to  speak  of  this  point  as  a  man  un- 
learned, but  having  some  experience :  had  it  not 
been  better  both  for  these  great  Princes  themselves 
and  all  their  subjects  that  lived  under  them,  and 
shall  live  under  their  successors,  to  have  held  a  mean 
in  all  things,  that  is  to  say,  to  have  attempted  fewer 
enterprises,  to  have  feared  more  to  offend  God,  and 
persecute  their  subjects  and  neighbours  so  many 
sundry  ways  above  rehearsed,  and  to  have  used  honest 
pleasures  and  recreation  ?  Yes  sure.  For  by  that 
means  their  lives  should  have  been  prolonged,  diseases 
should  not  so  soon  have  assailed  them,  their  death 
should  have  been  more  lamented  and  less  desired  ; 
yea,  and  they  should  have  had  less  cause  to  fear 
death.  .  .  . 

This  is  the  main  purport  of  the  historical 

criticism  of  Raleigh,  in  his  monumental  work. 

But   the  translation  of   histories  did  not 


138      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

give  opportunity  for  the  fullest  use  or  evolu- 
tion of  the  resources  of  the  language  ;  and  it 
is  to  Holland's  Plutarch  and  Florio's  Mon- 
taigne that  we  turn  for  the  spectacle.  Holland, 
a  mighty  scholar,  who  produced  a  whole 
barrow-load  of  huge  translations — Pliny,  Livy, 
Ammianus,  Suetonius — besides  his  Plutarch^ 
must  have  looked  askance  at  the  company  in 
which  that  folio  came  out,  both  for  its  modernity 
and  its  matter  ;  but  he  and  Florio  are  kindred 
craftsmen  in  their  handling  of  the  language. 
What  they  impress  us  with  above  all  is  its 
opulence.  They  are  going  to  print  in  folio, 
*an(l  they  are  not  fidgety  about  space.  Each 
had  a  copious  author  to  render,  and  each  was 
zealous  rather  to  expand  than  to  compress. 
Florio  had  the  advantage  in  respect  of  the 
unmatched  spontaneity  and  vitality  of  his 
original,  who  comes  into  the  literature  of 
Europe  with  almost  the  force  of  another 
Renaissance,  so  potently  does  he  extend  that 
"  discovery  of  man  "  which  has  been  declared 
to  be  the  purport  of  the  period  so  named. 
But  Montaigne  was  nourished  on  antiquity, 
and  Plutarch's  Moralia  is  the  nearest  classic 
equivalent  to  his  mass  of  multiform  commen- 
tary on  men  and  things.  Tp^Jtl}jaLJUiidu£L 
reverence  for  aiitiquitv  which  Bacon  oppugned 
with  special  regard  to  the  aiithority.,  q£  Arisr. 
totle,  Montaigne  was  the  supreme  corrective  ; 
an3jn]FloriQ's  handsJie  loses  nothing  of  hiis 
wholesome  provocativeness,  albeit  there  are 


THE   GREAT  PROSE  139 

frequent  mistakes  as  to  the  meaning  in  minor 
propositions.  In  a  society  much  addicted 
to  old  and  crusted  commonplace,  it  was  a 
liberalizing  and  expanding  experience  to  meet 
with  a  man  who  was  as  ready  to  flout  a  custom, 
an  authority,  or  a  convention  as  to  condemn 
thoughtless  neologism,  and  whose  self-dis- 
closure is  a  continuous  series  of  awakening 
shocks  to  dull  propriety.  Bacon's  polemic 
against  the  reign  of  Aristotle  is  but  one  of 
Montaigne's  defiances  to  enthroned  tradition  : 
he  has  a  thrust  at  every  abuse  and  every 
prejudice.  Here,  too,  was  an  opulence  of 
sheer  speech  as  great  as  that  of  Nashe,  with 
a  vastly  wider  and  richer  range  of  reflection. 
A  hundred  thoughts  which  have  passed  for 
original  profundities  are  thrown  out  by  Mon- 
taigne in  passing  :  there  is  no  human  problem 
upon  which  he  does  not  flash  his  light.  It 
seems  little  necessary  to  prove  in  detail  that 
he  deeply  stimulated  both  Bacon  and  Shake- 
speare :  it  would  have  been  astonishing  if  he 
had  not. 

If  Montaigne  was  not  otherwise  one  of  the 
most  important  forces  in  English  prose  litera- 
ture from  1603  onwards,  it  was  simply  because 
his  multitudinous  fresh  thought  was  above 
the  heads  of  the  majority,  as  indeed  it  must 
have  been.  The  normal  English  mind  can 
never  have  taken  easily  to  a  writer  so  uncon- 
cerned for  propriety,  so  reckless  of  prejudice, 
so  murderously  frank.     None  the  less  was  it 


140      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

a  boon  to  our  literature  that  he  should  have 
been  Englished  at  the  very  height  of  the 
power  of  the  Elizabethan  speech,  by  one  as 
free  of  that  as  Montaigne  was  of  his  powerful 
old  French.  For  the  "  endenizened  "  Florio 
is  one  of  the  happiest  treasurers  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan vocabulary,  dealing  it  out  with  a 
generous  zest  to  which  only  Philemon  Hol- 
land approximates.  More  correct  translations 
there  could  easily  be  ;  but  so  to  seize  the  spirit 
and  essence  of  the  immortal  original  as  to 
compete  with  that  in  all  its  literary  qualities 
was  a  feat  reserved  for  Florio,  and  indeed  pos- 
sible only  to  a  master  of  Elizabethan  prose. 


CHAPTER    VII 

POETRY    AFTER    SPENSER 

Spenser  was  fortunate  in  respect  of  the 
foils  to  his  work  presented  by  the  contem- 
porary translators  who  most  nearly  paralleled 
it.  Obviously  Ariosto  and  Tasso  were  his 
main  models  ;  and  to  compare  him,  in  English 
verse,  with  his  foreign  masters  was  to  realize 
that  the  disciple  had  an  art  and  an  inspiration 
all  his  own.  It  may  or  may  not  have  been 
the  example  of  Spenser  that  stirred  Sir  John 
Harington  and  Edward  Fairfax  to  make  their 
translations  from  Ariosto  and  Tasso  {Orlando 
FuriosOy  1591  ;  Godfrey  of  Bulloigne ;  or^ 
Jerusalem  Delivered^  1600) ;    but  Fairfax  is 


POETRY  AFTER   SPENSER      141 

clearly  influenced  by  him.  Their  profuse 
assurances  as  to  the  moral  and  allegorical 
aims  of  their  originals  are  warnings  against 
a  confiding  view  of  the  ethical  purpose  of 
Spenser ;  but  while  they  doubtless  made  their 
market  in  respect  of  those  claims,  they 
naturally  do  not  attain  to  the  kinds  of  com- 
pensation which  he  is  able  to  offer  for  unreality 
of  theme.  Harington's  sole  attraction  for  a 
modern  student  is  his  exuberant  naivete  ;  of 
poetic  faculty  he  has  the  scantiest  endowment. 
Of  Fairfax,  certainly  a  much  more  careful  and 
competent  workman,  it  was  possible  for  some 
to  speak  with  warm  admiration  as  late  as  the 
first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  ;  but  such 
a  taste  could  not  well  survive  the  age  of 
Tennyson  ;  and  indeed  it  was  probably  from 
the  first  confined  to  a  fastidious  few.  Possible 
as  a  romance  for  an  age  which  could  be  fascin- 
ated by  the  florid  prolixities  of  the  Arcadia 
and  the  protracted  fictions  of  Mademoiselle 
Scudery,  Fairfax's  version  of  the  crusading 
epic  of  Tasso  had  small  power  to  hold  a  world 
in  which  successive  developments  of  realistic 
drama  were  at  length  to  be  eclipsed  in  living 
interest  by  the  long  evolution  of  the  English 
novel.  The  melody  and  the  literary  art  of 
the  Italian  originals  inevitably  evaporated  in 
the  hands  of  translators  without  special  gifts, 
Fairfax  is  always  metrically  accurate,  and  is 
frequently  musical  in  a  simply  verbal  way ; 
but  he  is  always  far  short  of  the  Spenserian 


142      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

charm,  and  he  has  a  way  of  compiling  Hnes 
which  give  a  permanent  monition  as  to  how 
poetry  is  not  to  be  written.  Such  series  of 
vocables  as  : 

A  blow  so  huge,  so  strong,  so  great,  so  sore  .  .  . 
Sleep,  ease,  repose,  rest,  peace  and  quiet  brings  .  .  . 
But  so  doth  heaven  men's  hearts  turn,  alter,  change . . . 
Grief,  sorrow,  anguish,  sadness,  discontent  .  .  . 
Jerusalem  they  view,  they  see,  they  spy  .  .  . 
His  hate,  his  ire,  his  rancour  and  his  wrath  .  .  , 
Their  eager  rage,  their  fury,  spite,  and  ire  .  .  . 

evidently  struck  him  as  impressive,  and  he 
chronically  presents  them.  Spenser's  padding 
is  often  bad  enough,  critically  considered  ;  but 
he  is  never  reduced  to  such  mere  collation 
of  synonyms.  From  such  patchwork  as  this, 
and  from  allegorical  epic  in  general,  the  spirit 
of  poetry  turned  away  in  the  next  reign  to 
the  more  blessed  tasks  of  the  drama,  of  sub- 
jective verse — as  in  Donne,  Carew,  Herbert, 
and  Crashaw — and  of  the  lyric.  Herrick, 
who  occupies  himself,  strictly  speaking,  with 
none  of  these  things,  being  in  truth  a  poly- 
mathic  artist  in  light  verse,  is  the  living  re- 
minder that  for  all  alike  there  is  one  thing 
needful,  the  concern  for  sincerity  of  feeling  and 
beauty  of  form. 
P  But  round  Spenser  in  his  closing  years  there 
I  grew  up  a  whole  cluster  of  sonneteers  and  nar- 
\  rative  poets,  who  are  in  their  degree  as  char- 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      143 

acteristic  of  the  age  as  he,  or  as  the  drama 
which  is  its  supreme  production.  And  again 
the^timulus  can  be  seen  to  come  from  foreign 
hteratures,  now  more  widely  studied  tifan 
ever  ;  m  particular  the  French.  The  sonnets 
of  Surrey  and  Wyatt,  inspired  by  Italian 
models,  had  not  set  any  save  a  private 
fashion  ;  and  it  was  not  till  1584  that TEomag" 
Watson's  Hekatompathia^  or  Passionate  Cen- 
turie  of  Love^  began  a  native  movement  which 
was  powerfully  stimulated  by  French  example, 
and  which  after  six  or  seven  years  developed 
into  a  craze. 

The  first  sonnets  published  in  this  sequence 
were  quite  the  worst.  Watson  avowedly 
copies  French  and  other  models,  and  he  does 
it  unmelodiously,  infelicitously,  and  cheaply. 
But  when  he  published  his  first  set,  many 
others  had  been  penned  and  privately  circu- 
lated for  years  past.  Sidney  in  particular 
had  already  done  many  of  his  series  to  Stella  ; 
and  in  1591  these  were  posthumously  pub- 
lished, with  the  effect  of  eliciting  a  perfect 
hubbub  of  imitation.  The  Astrophel  and 
Stella  title  set  the  fashion  of  poetic  names  for 
such  series.  Samuel  Daniel  came  out  next 
year  with  his  batch  to  Delia,  and  Henry 
Constable  with  his  consignment  to  Diana. 
In  1593  appeared  Barnabe  Barnes's  Parthe- 
nophil  and  Parthenophe,  Lodge's  Phillis,  Giles 
Fletcher's  Licia,  and  another  posthumous 
bundle  from  Watson,  as  dead  as  their  diligent 


144      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

author.  Next  year  came  revisions  of  Delia 
and  Diana,  accompanied  by  William  Percy's 
Coelia,  somebody's  Zepheria,  and  Drayton's 
Idea  (first  form) ;  in  1595,  Richard  Barn- 
field's  Cynthia,  Spenser's  Amoretti,  and  E.  C.'s 
Emaricdulfe — an  effort  at  originality  in  choice 
of  title  at  least,  but  only  by  way  of  an  ana- 
gram on  the  name  of  one  Marie  Cufeld.  In 
1596  high-water  mark  as  to  quantity  was 
reached  with  Griffin's  Fidessa,  Linch's  Diella^ 
and  William  Smith's  Chloris.  A  Laura,  by 
Robert  Tofte,  arrived  in  1597.  Shakespeare 
by  this  time  had  written  a  number  of  his 
sonnets,  but  was  not  minded  to  join  the  aviary 
in  print,  though  an  average  sample  of  his 
has  more  charm  and  spontaneity  than  any 
save  the  best  in  the  swarm. 

Never  had  there  been  such  an  outburst  of 
lyricism  in  England  ;  and,  despite  the  facility 
of  much  of  the  output,  never,  perhaps,  was 
there  in  proportion  so  little  of  satisfying  result 
to  garner  for  posterity.  The  poets  at  first 
sight  seem  a  very  nest  of  singing  birds,  sing- 
ing because  they  must,  on  the  ancient,  the 
primal  impulse.  A  perusal  soon  arouses  a 
cold  suspicion,  fully  confirmed  by  exact 
modern  research,  that  the  nest  of  singing 
birds  is  a  cage  of  parrots.  They  translate 
the  French  and  the  Italians,  and  they  imitate 
"each  other.  Spenser  and  Sidney  alone  seem 
to  have  had  a  sincere  motive :  Sidney's  pre- 
cept, finishing  the  first  sonnet  in  the  post- 


POETRY   AFTER   SPENSER       145 

humous  collection,  was  the  one  thing  to  1 
which  none  of  the  imitators  seems  to  have 
paid  any  attention.  Daniel,  Drayton,  Con- 
stable, and  Lodge  copied  their  very  titles ; 
and  the  three  last-named  include  in  their 
series  direct  but  unavowed  translations  fromj 
the  French ;  as  does  even  Spenser  at  times. 
Lodge  is  perhaps  the  most  hardened — and  not 
the  least  skilful — plagiarist  of  all :  half  his 
sonnets  are  translations.  If  ever  the  sonnet 
is  personal,  in  the  hands  of  any  of  the  lesser 
practitioners,  it  is  impossible  to  divine  the 
fact  with  certainty  from  any  superior  vitality 
in  the  product.  Sidney  had  warned  the 
earlier  sonneteers  : 

You  that  do  dictionary's  method  bring 
Into  your  rhjmies  running  in  ratthng  rows  ; 
You  that  poor  Petrarch's  long  deceased  woes 

With  newborn  sighs  and  denizened  *  wit  do  sing  : 
You  take  wrong  ways  !  Those  far-fet  helps  be  such 
As  do  bewray  a  want  of  inward  touch. 

And  in  the  very  delivery  of  the  warning  he 
himself  is  but  turning  a  compliment  to  Stella 
— one  of  the  many  which  leave  men  and 
women  still  debating  whether  he  was  in  love 
with  her. 

It  all  raises  the  question  mooted  by  a  poet 
of  our  own  day,  whether  most  poetry  is  not 
written  because  of  lack  of  poetic  feeling,  by 
people  seeking  to  set  up  the  mood  they  crave 
for.  Sidney,  doubtless,  had  some  live  coals 
*  Natui^alized  in  a  foreign  country. 
10 


146     ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

on  his  altar  ;  Daniel  could  be  at  times  a  poet 
in  other  forms  than  that  of  the  sonnet ;  Lodge 
had  a  genuine  gift  for  lyric  ;  and  Drayton 
did  one  of  the  few  really  great  sonnets  of  the 
whole  mass,  besides  moving  Shakespeare  to 
direct  imitation  in  one  other.     Drayton's 

Since  there's  no  help,  come  let  us  kiss  and  part, 

has  the  ring  of  actuality,  even  if  it  be  an 
imitation  ;  and  Sidney  is  often  enough  vibrant 
with  a  certain  intensity  of  feeling  to  leave 
the  problem  in  his  case  an  open  one.  But 
some  nine  out  of  ten  in  the  multitude  raise 
no  speculation  at  all  beyond  wonder  at  the 
assiduity  with  which  men  went  on  apostro- 
phizing the  "  cruel  fair "  as  a  stone  or  a 
tigress,  a  flint  or  a  steel.  "  Those  fatal  an- 
thems and  afflicted  songs,"  as  Daniel  justly 
describes  his  own,  almost  move  us  to  join  in 
Sir  John  Davies's  diatribe  against  the  ''  bas- 
tard sonnets"  which  "base  rhymers  daily 
begot  to  their  own  shames  and  poetry's 
disgrace " ;  though  he  was  chiefly  disgusted 
with  the  quasi-legal  stanzas  which  in  his  own 
Sonnets  he  so  wittily  burlesqued.  A  plau- 
sible theory  is  that  sonneteering  was  for  a 
time  a  recognized  mode  of  wooing  ;  that  the 
variegated  apostrophe  to  the  mistress  as  a 
thing  of  marble  was  a  species  of  compliment 
highly  appreciated  ;  and  that  the  display  of 
rhyming  power  operated  somewhat  as  the 
colouring  of  the  male  bird  has  been  supposed 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      14T 

to  do  in  charming  the  female  on  humbler 
levels  of  life.  But  on  any  view  the  fact  re- 
mains that  this  particular  impulse  from  foreign 
literatures,  coming  among  a  people  avowedly 
much  given,  with  all  their  insularity  (perhaps 
by  reason  of  it),  to  the  copying  of  foreign 
fashions,  elicited  for  the  most  part  but  un- 
inspired mimicry,  whereas  the  debt  to  foreign 
sources  in  the  case  of  the  drama  was  as  no- 
thing compared  with  the  native  energy  spent 
in  turning  mere  tales  of  incident  into  creations 
of  character  beside  which  the  prototypes  are 
as  shadows. 

The  situation  as  regards  the  sonnet  was  in 
the  end  partially  saved  by  Shakespeare,  when 
his  manuscripts  were  published  without  his 
leave.  He  too  took  to  the  sonnet  under  an 
impulse  of  imitation,  often  echoing  his  con- 
temporaries in  phrase  and  in  topic.  But  ^ 
the  abnormal  perceptivity  and  responsiveness  v!^ 
which  underlie  his  dramatic  work,  and  the 
unique  facility  of  rhythmic  utterance  evi- 
denced by  his  two  long  poems,  made  the  son- 
net for  him  an  instrument  as  apt  as  to  others 
it  was  recalcitrant.  He  never  essayed  the  true 
Petrarchan  form,  which  is  the  richest ;  but 
he  has  given  us  a  far  larger  number  of  really 
mellifluous  sonnets  than  any  other  man  con- 
trived to  compass.  It  is  far  from  certain 
that  all,  even  of  the  most  serious  of  his,  are 
any  more  truly  personal  than  those  of  the 
average  sonnet-monger.     One  of  the  gravest. 


148      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

Two  loves  I  have  of  comfort  and  despair, 

is  an  obvious  imitation  of  one  of  Drayton's ; 
unless,  indeed,  Drayton  had  read  Shake- 
speare's in  manuscript  and  copied  that.  See- 
ing that  the  146th  rather  obviously  echoes 
that  of  Sidney  beginning : 

Leave  me,  O  Love,  which  reaches  but  to  dust, 

the  presumption  here  is  against  Shakespeare  ; 
and  there  are  further  reasons  for  doubting 
the  personal  character  of  many  sonnets  in 
the  series.  Though,  like  others  of  his  day, 
he  may  have  described  himself  as  old  when 
in  his  thirties  (Nos.  63  and  73),  it  is  hard  to 
believe  that  in  that  (No.  62)  in  which  are  the 
lines : 

But  when  my  glass  shows  me  myself  indeed, 
Beated  and  chopp'd  with  tann'd  antiquity, 

he  is  not  writing  on  behalf  of  a  much  older 
man,  as  Drayton  avows  he  once  did  for  a 
young  one.     In  No.  138  we  have  merely : 

My  days  are  past  the  best. 

If  one  sonnet  be  impersonal,  many  others 
may  be.  One  closing  couplet  is  duplicated 
(Nos.  36  and  96) ;  and  images  are  often  re- 
peated {e.g.  Nos.  2  and  60).  When  we  learn 
that  the  stepfather  of  the  Earl  of  Southampton 
was  a  "  Mr.  W.  H.,"  we  seem  to  see  a  way 
out  of  the  puzzle  set  up  by  the  famous  dedica- 
tion of  the  printer.     But  whatever  may  be 


POETRY   AFTER   SPENSER      149 

the  difficulty  of  counting  it  all  personal,  it 
is  no  less  difficult  to  doubt  that  in  the  sonnets 
which  tell  of 

Desiring  this  man's  art  and  that  man's  soope, 

and  of  having 

gone  here  and  there 
And  made  myself  a  motley  to  the  view, 

the  poet  is  penning  his  own  confession.  We 
can  but  say  that,  whatever  the  inspiration, 
he  is  the  most  musical  of  all  the  sonneteers. 
Sometimes  trivial,  sometimes  mawkish,  he  can 
hardly  escape  being  tuneful.  None  else  can 
ring  the  golden  or  the  silver  bells  of  song  as 
he  does  in  such  lines  as  these : 

That  thou  among  the  wastes  of  time  must  go  «  «  g 

And  stretched  metre  of  an  antique  song  .  .  . 

With  April's  first-born  flowers,  and  all  things  rare 
That  heaven's  air  in  this  huge  rondure  hems  .  .  . 

But  that  wild  music  burthens  every  bough  .  .  • 

Not  mine  own  fears,  nor  the  prophetic  soul 

Of  the  wide  world,  dreaming  on  things  to  come. 

Can  yet  the  lease  of  my  true  love  control. 

Supposed  as  forfeit  to  a  confined  doom. 

The  mortal  moon  hath  her  eclipse  endured 

And  the  sad  augurs  mock  their  own  presage.  •  «  m 

And  beauty  making  beautiful  old  rhyme. 

He  is  inevitably  rhythmical,  spontaneously 
lyrical ;  and  only  Sidney  and  Drayton  at  their 
best  can  compare  with  him  in  force  of  feeling. 


150      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

Sir  John  Davies,  the  foe  of  the  sonneteers, 
switched  poetry  off  upon  very  different  hnes 
from  theirs ;  showing,  however,  more  of 
originaUty  and  intellectual  power'  than  of 
poetic  inspiration.  In  1596  appeared  his 
Orchestra;  or^  A  Poem  of  Dauncingy  sl  thing 
*'  judicially "  planned  and  penned,  as  the 
title-page  claimed,  and  withal  picked  out  with 
many  a  good  line.     Two  in  particular — 

For  his  [the  Sea's]  great  crystal  eye  is  always  cast 
Up  to  the  Moon,  and  on  her  fixed  fast — 

caught  the  wandering  glance  of  Coleridge, 
who  turned  them  into 

His  great  bright  eye  most  silently 
Up  to  the  Moon  is  cast. 

Davies  continued  the  figure  musically  enough  : 

And  as  she  daunceth  in  her  pallid  sphere 
So  daunceth  he  about  his  Center  here  ; 

and  he  at  times  makes  a  single  line  really  sing 
for  us,  as  these  : 

Or  as  a  brook  through  pebbles  wandering  .  .  . 
Love  in  the  twinkling  of  your  eyelids  daunceth. 

But  Davies  is  a  jurist,  a  reasoner,  an  Eliza- 
bethan "  wit "  ;  and  he  thinks  it  a  happy 
stroke  to  give  us  this  : 

Behold  the  World,  how  it  is  whirled  round 
And  for  it  is  so  whirVd,  is  named  so  ! 


POETRY  AFTER   SPENSER       151 

Had  the  Gulling  Sonnets  been  printed  in 
that  day,  instead  of  being  left  in  manuscript 
for  moderns  to  pubUsh,  the  sonneteers  must 
surely  have  taken  their  revenge  on  their 
assailant ;  as,  indeed,  they  ought  to  have 
done  over  his  egregious  series  of  twenty-six 
acrostic  Hymns  to  Astrcea  (1599),  every  one 
in  three  stanzas  of  five,  five,  and  six  lines, 
and  all  the  lines  beginning  with  the  letters 
ELisA  BETHA  REGiNA.  It  is  the  last  word  in 
Elizabethan  "  foppery."  And  yet  this  strenu- 
ous trifler — who  was  indeed  a  man  of  great 
force  of  character,  which  he  exhibited  in  re- 
sponsible posts  after  a  violent  youth-time — 
produced  the  most  elaborately  intellectual 
poem  of  that  age,  the  Nosce  Teipsum  ("  Know 
Thyself"),  wherein  that  ''Oracle"  is  "ex- 
pounded in  two  elegies,  1.  Of  human  know- 
ledge; 2.  Of  the  Soul  of  Man  and  the 
immortality  thereof  "  (1599).  The  poem  was 
written  during  a  year  of  disgrace,  fully  earned 
by  an  act  of  ruffianly  violence  in  the  dining- 
hall  of  the  Middle  Temple  ;  but  no  man  could 
infer  from  the  verse  that  its  author  was  lack- 
ing in  self-control.  A  whole  series  of  critics 
have  avowed  themselves  divided  between  the 
two  impressions  set  up  by  Davies's  ratiocina- 
tive  aim  and  procedure,  so  hard  to  endue 
with  poetic  charm,  and  the  real  skill  and 
distinction  of  his  versification.  It  is  difficult 
by  any  standard — impossible  by  those  of  the 
sixteenth,   seventeenth,  and  eighteenth  cen- 


152      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

turies — to  deny  the  title  of  poetry  to  these 
stanzas : 

What  is  this  knowledge  but  the  sky-stoln  fire 
For  which  the  thief  still  chain 'd  in  ice  doth  sit  ? 

And  which  the  poor  rude  Satyr  would  admire, 
And  needs  would  kiss,  but  burnt  his  lips  with  it. 

We  that  acquaint  ourselves  with  every  zone. 
And  pass  both  tropics,  and  behold  the  poles. 

When  we  come  home,  are  to  ourselves  unknown. 
And  unacquainted  still  with  our  own  souls. 

I  know  my  soul  hath  power  to  know  all  things. 
Yet  is  she  blind  and  ignorant  in  all ; 

I  know  I  am  one  of  Nature's  little  kings. 
Yet  to  the  last  and  vilest  things  am  thrall. 

It  is  only  the  sustained  and  persistent  disputa- 
tion that  forces  us  out  of  the  poetic  mood 
set  up  again  and  again  in  both  parts  of  the 
book  by  grave  music  of  this  kind.  Didacti- 
cism is  well-nigh  everywhere  in  Elizabethan 
poetry  ;  but  Davies  carries  didacticism  to 
the  plane  of  dialectic,  where  poetry,  in 
essence  "  simple,  passionate,  sensuous,"  can- 
not ply  her  wings.  And  yet  this  curiously 
argumentative  and  propagandist  poem,  with 
its  pertinacious  special  pleading,  may  be 
found  more  readable  by  some  lovers  of  poetry 
in  our  day  than  many  coeval  performances 
that  profess  loyalty  to  the  artistic  first  prin- 
ciples which  it  defies,  inasmuch  as  they  so 
often  fall  from  grace  in  the  pursuit  of  poetic 
purpose,  while  this  so  often  rises  to  charm 


POETRY  AFTER   SPENSER       153 

in  the  course  of  a  planned  dissertation.  There 
is  reason  to  think,  anyway,  that  Shakespeare 
read  it  with  some  attention  (he  uses  its 
phrase  ''  spirit  of  sense  ")  ;  and  we  may  do 
as  much. 

More  assured,  however,  of  the  attention  of 
poetry-craving  readers  are  the  muses  of  the 
two  more  famous  poets  who  flourished  in 
and  out-lived  the  Elizabethan  age,  Drayton 
and  Daniel,  although  both  wrote  long  quasi- 
historical  poems  which  from  the  point  of  view 
of  posterity  make  the  cardinal  mistake  of 
setting  poetry  to  do  non-poetical  work.  It 
was  not  quite  unjustly  said  of  Daniel  by 
Drayton  in  old  age  that  his  poetic  manner 
"  better  fitted  prose  "  ;  but  the  puzzle  is  to 
know  wherein  Drayton  thought  his  own 
average  manner  was  any  better.  Thomas 
Lodge,  himself  an  accomplished  writer  in 
many  forms,  spoke  of  ''  Daniel,  choice  in 
word  and  invention ;  Drayton,  diligent  and 
formal."  In  any  case,  Daniel's  poetic  manner 
was  his  best.  The  prose  of  his  Collection  of 
the  History  of  England  is  in  the  main  flat ; 
while  the  diction  of  his  rhymed  Civil  Wars 
is  often  stately  enough  to  make  the  phrase 
"  well-languaged  Daniel,"  applied  to  him  by 
William  Browne,  thoroughly  applicable.  His 
line  on  the  Thames — 

Glides  on  with  pomp  of  waters  unwithstood — 

recommended  itself  to  Wordsworth  and  Coler- 


154      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

idge,  of  whom  the  latter  pronounced  his  verse 
"  a  model  of  the  middle  style  "  ;  and  he  has 
many  such  well-sounding  lines.  But  he  is  at 
his  best  in  gravely  impassioned  argument,  of 
which  his  finest  example  is  the  MusophiluSy 
or^  A  General  Defence  of  Learning  (1599),  a 
not  very  promising  title  of  a  philosophic 
poem.  It  is  in  this  vein  that  he  comes  nearest 
to  the  passion  which  engenders  poetry : 

For  Emulation,  that  proud  nurse  of  Wit, 
Scorning  to  stay  below  or  come  behind. 

Labours  upon  that  narrow  top  to  sit 
Of  sole  perfection  in  the  highest  kind. 

II,  259-62. 

This  is  the  thing  that  I  was  born  to  do  : 
This  is  my  Scene,  this  part  I  must  fulfil. 

II,  577-8. 

Men  find  that  action  is  another  thing 

Than  what  they  in  discoursing  papers  read : 

The  world's  affairs  require  in  managing 

More  Arts  than  those  wherein  you  clerks  proceed  : 

Whilst  timorous  knowledge  stands  considering. 
Audacious  Ignorance  hath  done  the  deed  ; 

For  who  knows  most,  the  more  he  knows  to  doubt : 

The  least  discourse  is  commonly  most  stout. 

II,  486-93. 

At  times  the  poetic  plane  is  really  reached : 

Who  can  tell  for  what  great  work  in  hand 
The  greatness  of  our  style  is  now  ordained  ? 

What  powers  it  shall  bring  in,  what  spirits  com- 
mand .  •  • 

It  is  well  approved 
The  speech  of  heaven  with  whom  they  have  com- 
merce 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      155 

That  only  seem  out  of  themselves  remov'd 

And  do  with  more  than  human  skills  converse  : 

Those  numbers  wherewith  heav'n  and  earth  are  mov'd 
Show,  weakness  speaks  in  Prose,  but  Power  in  Verse. 

II,  963-80. 

In  some  of  his  didactic  epistles,  as  in  that 
To  the  Countess  of  Bedford^  he  again  reaches 
high  levels : 

Since  all  the  good  we  have  rests  in  the  mind. 
By  whose  proportions  only  we  redeem 

Our  thoughts  from  out  confusion,  and  do  find 
The  measure  of  ourselves  and  of  our  powers. 

And  that  all  happiness  remains  confined 
Within  the  kingdom  of  this  breast  of  ours. 

II,  50-6. 

Best    of    all    perhaps   is    the    often-quoted 
couplet  (a  saying  of  Seneca^s) : 

And  that  unless  above  himself  he  can 
Erect  himself,  how  poor  a  thing  is  man. 

To  the  Countess  of  Cumberland,  II,  98-99. 

Not  unnaturally  did  Wordsworth  find  a 
kindred  spirit  in  the  writer  of  these  lines,  who 
anticipates  him  in  many  matters,  though  not 
in  his  worship  of  Nature,  which  was  not  an 
Elizabethan  cult.  Jonson  ought  to  have 
admired  Daniel,  but  did  not. 

Drayton,  in  his  partly  different  way,  is  no 
more  if  no  less  memorable.  He  had  more  of 
sheer  poetic  fire  :  none  of  Daniel's  sonnets 
will  compare  with  his  best ;  and  his  Ballad  of 
Agincourt  is  quite  out  of  his  brother  poet's 


156      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

reach ;  but  he,  too,  produced  a  mass  of  his- 
toriographic  verse  in  which  inspiration  is  as 
it  were  only  strenuously  climbed  to,  Pegasus 
not  being  available.  In  his  early  Harmony  of 
the  Church  (1591),  the  height  is  not  at  all 
attained ;  and  it  remains  something  of  a 
mystery  that  that  tame  performance  should 
have  been  ecclesiastically  prosecuted.  But 
in  his  Ode  to  Elizabeth  (1593)  there  is  a  real 
lyric  flight,  and  a  flash  of  transfiguring  charm  : 

Make  her  a  goodly  chapilet  of  azur'd  columbine. 
And  wreathe  about  her  coronet  with  sweetest  eglan- 
tine ; 
Bedeck  our  Beta  all  with  1    es, 
And  the  dainty  daffadillies. 
With  roses  damask,  white  and  red,  and  fairest  flower- 

de-lys. 
With  cowslips  of  Jerusalem^  and  cloves  of  Paradise. 

He  was  a  warm  admirer  of  both  Spenser 
and  Sidney  :  indeed,  he  is  cordial  in  his  praise 
of  many  contemporaries,  including  Shake- 
speare. Spenser,  in  turn,  probably  meant  for 
him  the  praise  given  to  "  Action  "  in  Colin 
ClouVs  Come  Home  Again,  But  he  is  singu- 
larly unequal  in  his  execution.  It  has  been 
said  of  him,  with  guarded  enthusiasm,  that 
in  his  work  "  poetry  is  never  far  off  "  ;  and 
this  may  be  hesitatingly  allowed,  with  the 
suggestion  that  The  Barons^  Wars  and  Poly- 
olbion  had  better  not  be  grappled  with  by  the 
ingenuous  reader  till  he  has  otherwise  realized 
that   Drayton   is   really   a   poet.     His   con- 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      157 

temporaries  called  him  "  golden-mouthed " 
as  they  called  Daniel  well-languaged  ;  and 
they  pair  well,  though  Drayton's  richer  epithet 
is  scarcely  judicial.  The  truth  is  that  his 
occasional  prose  has  rather  more  distinction 
than  the  bulk  of  his  abundant  yet  laboured 
verse.  When  in  1603  he  transposed  his 
Mortimeriados  into  The  Barons^  Wars,  alter- 
ing the  stanza  of  seven  lines  into  one  of  eight, 
he  affixed  an  explanatory  preface  that  has 
fascinated  every  modern  reader  with  its 
justification  of  the  technical  change; 

This  [stanza]  of  eight  both  holds  the  tune  clean 
thorow  to  the  Base  of  the  Column  (which  is  the 
couplet,  the  foot  or  bottom)  and  closeth  not  but  with 
a  full  satisfaction  to  the  ear  for  so  long  detention. 

Briefly,  this  sort  of  stanza  hath  in  it  Majesty,  Per- 
fection, and  Solidity,  resembling  the  pillar  which  in 
Architecture  is  called  the  Tuscan,  whose  Shaft  is  of 
six  Diameters,  and  Bases  of  two.  The  other  reasons 
this  place  will  not  bear  ;  but  generally,  all  Stanzas 
are  in  my  opinion  but  Tyrants  and  Torturers,  when 
they  make  invention  obey  their  number,  which 
sometime  would  otherwise  but  scantle  itself.  A 
fault  that  great  Masters  in  this  Art  strive  to  avoid. 

The  reader  of  The  Barons^  Wars  is  tempted  to 
give  a  respectful  assent  to  the  indictment  of 
all  stanzas,  without  acquiescing  in  the  prior 
claim  for  that  of  eight  lines.  Drayton  often 
rises  high  above  the  sesthetic  levels  of  the 
Mirrour  for  Magistrates ;  but  also  terribly 
often  adheres  to  them. 

In  his  own  day  he  seems  to  have  been  famed 


158      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

for  the  Idea  sonnets,  which  aim  in  general 
more  successfully  at  force  than  at  beauty, 
and  his  England's  Heroical  Epistles  (1597), 
which  were  many  times  reprinted.  It  would 
seem  that  their  form — the  heroic  couplet — 
had  much  to  do  with  their  acceptance.  It 
undeniably  gives  them  a  certain  declamatory 
and  epigrammatic  vigour,  which  makes  the 
Epistle  of  Rosamond  to  Henry  sound  more 
incisively  than  Daniel's  Complaint  of  Rosa- 
mond ;  and  the  taste  for  this  was  to  become 
the  ruling  standard  in  England  for  many 
generations.  But  while  we  may  fairly  liken 
Drayton  to  Dryden  for  power  in  this  kind, 
we  are  not  thereby  withheld  from  confessing 
that,  though  there  will  always  be  readers  who 
prefer  rhetoric  to  poetry,  his  most  popular 
work  stands  rather  for  a  surrender  than  a 
capture  of  the  great  guerdon  sought  for  in 
the  best  hours  of  Elizabethan  song. 

The  most  inspired  poem  of  his  Elizabethan 
time  is  the  Endimion  and  Phoebe  (1595), 
which  he  not  only  did  not  reprint  but  aban- 
doned, turning  much  of  it  later  (1606)  into 
the  unreadable  satirical  piece  called  The  Man 
in  the  Moon^  as  if  he  repented  of  the  original. 
Inspired  probably  less  by  Venus  and  Adonis 
than  by  Marlowe's  posthumous  Hero  and 
Leander^  which  had  been  circulated  in  manu- 
script before  being  printed,  the  Endimion 
belongs  to  the  springtime  of  his  genius  ;  and 
has  more  of  vital  power,  though  much  less  of 


POETRY  AFTER   SPENSER       159 

sustained  fluency,  than  Shakespeare's  facile 
and  popular  poem.  It  is  an  open  question 
whether  it  was  jettisoned  because  of  misgiving 
about  its  theme  or  of  disinclination  to  re- 
main in  competition  with  a  piece  which  had 
eclipsed  it  in  vogue.  Perhaps  both  surmises 
may  stand.  Drayton's  sense  of  perfection 
was  uneasy  rather  than  sure  :  he  left  weak 
lines  in  his  famous  Ballad  even  after  long  re- 
vision ;  and  the  Battle  of  Agincourt  into  which 
he  inflated  it  is  heavily  laboured  and  ill- 
inspired.  But  he  always  had  in  him,  in  his 
own  words  of  generous  praise  of  the  compeers 
of  his  youth,  "  brave  translunary  things  "  ; 
and  the  fashion  in  which,  from  his  Elizabethan 
roots,  he  put  forth  in  later  life  all  manner  of 
poetry  in  the  fashion  of  another  age,  is  one  of 
the  most  singular  things  in  literary  history. 

Marlowe  revealed  his  elemental  power  less 
in  narrative  than  in  dramatic  verse ;  but 
there  too  his  force  transcends  that  of  nearly 
all  his  rivals.  Shakespeare  of  course  excelled 
him  in  fluidity,  but  fell  below  him  in  vigour, 
being  for  once  bent  only  on  book-making, 
whereas  Marlowe  wrought  [always  with  a 
certain  eager  ardour,  which  gives  vividness  to 
the  first  sestiad  of  his  unfinished  Hero  and 
Leander,  and  to  the  second  something  more ; 
though  it  must  be  admitted  that  Chapman, 
who  continued  the  poem  through  four  added 
sestiads,  shows  on  the  whole  a  more  abundant 
vein.     In  this  erotic  poem  Marlowe  is  notably 


160      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

sententious  ;  and  Shakespeare  mused  on  his 
"  saw  of  might  "  which  comes  at  the  close  of  a 
passage  not  usually  quoted  in  full. 

It  lies  not  in  our  power  to  lovo  or  hate, 

For  will  in  us  is  overruled  by  fate. 

When  two  are  stript,  long  ere  the  course  begin. 

We  wish  that  one  would  lose,  the  other  win  ; 

And  one  especially  do  we  affect 

Of  two  gold  ingots,  like  in  each  respect ; 

The  reason  no  man  knows  :    let  it  suffice 

What  we  behold  is  censured  [  ■■=  judged]  by  our  eyes. 

Where  both  deliberate,  the  love  is  slight : 

Who  ever  loved  that  loved  not  at  first  sight  ? 

As  if  to  show  that  he  was  no  mere  amorist, 
he  followed  up  his  version  (in  every  sense  loose) 
of  Ovid's  Elegies  with  one  of  the  first  book 
of  Lucan,  of  which  the  concision  and  force, 
maintained  line  for  line  throughout,  are  not 
to  be  matched  among  English  translations. 

That  tour  de  force  might  have  been  expected 
to  have  set  up  a  fashion  of  narrative  or  epic 
blank  verse  ;  but  the  lead  was  not  taken, 
save  perhaps  by  Shakespeare  and  Jonson  in 
the  liberation  of  their  rhythms.  Like  Chap- 
man and  Drayton,  Jonson  was  fatally  at- 
tracted to  the  heroic  couplet  for  his  non- 
dramatic  purposes ;  and  it  is  in  that  pedestrian 
measure  that  he  pens  most  of  the  Epistles  and 
Elegies  which  give  weight  to  his  Forest  and 
his  Underwoods.  What  he  could  do  with  it 
at  and  near  his  best  is  to  be  seen  in  his  noble 
lines  To  the  Memory  of  my  beloved  Master 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      161 

William  Shakespeare  ;  his  glowing  Vision  on 
the  Muses  of  his  friend  Michael  Drayton ; 
and  his  less  exalted  epistles  To  the  Earl  of 
Dorset^  To  a  Friend,  to  persuade  him  to  the 
Wars,  and  To  Master  John  Selden.  All  this 
is  post-Elizabethan ;  but  here,  varying  be- 
tween the  moral  vein,  as  in  the  lines  : 

'Tis  by  degrees  that  men  arrive  at  glad 
Profit  in  aught :    each  day  some  little  add. 
In  time  'twill  be  a  heap  :   this  is  not  true 
Alone  in  money,  but  in  manners  too, 

and  the  higher  flight  of  his  enthusiascic 
panegyrics,  he  sets  the  Elizabethan  stamp 
upon  a  mode  of  verse  which  was  to  be  the 
normal  form  of  poetry  in  England  for  two 
hundred  years. 

Truly  Elizabethan,  too,  was  Chapman  in 
some  respects  ;  yet  he  might  almost  be  called 
the  spiritual  father  of  the  ''  metaphysical  " 
school  of  the  next  age.  He  enters  the  scene 
in  1594,  with  his  Shadow  of  Night,  made  up  of 
a  Hymnus  in  Noctem  and  a  Hymnus  in  Cyn- 
thiam.  Anything  further  removed  from  the 
still  unfinished  Faerie  Queene  it  would  be  hard 
to  plan.  In  technique  Chapman  is  at  once 
novel,  obscure,  and  wantonly  archaic.  He 
flaunts  the  old  offence  of  gratuitously  altering 
accent  to  make  a  rhyme  : 

Who  running  far,  at  length  each  pours  her  heart 
Into  the  bosom  of  the  gulfy  desar^. 

And  eagle-like  dost  with  thy  starry  wings 

Beat  in  the  fowls  and  beasts  to  Sonmus'  lodg^n^r^. 

11 


1C2      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

The  archaistic  school — Spenser  and  Peele  in 
particular — had  done  this  kind  of  thing  ap- 
parently as  part  of  their  archaism  ;  and  the 
song-makers  copied  the  old  usage  naturally  : 
Chapman  combines  it  with  the  most  reckless 
neology,  in  a  superfoetation  of  thought  and 
imagery  that  often  defies  construing.  The 
effect  of  this,  as  of  much  of  his  later  verse,  in- 
cluding the  dramatic,  can  best  be  likened  to 
that  of  a  volcano  erupting  in  darkness,  with 
an  immensity  of  occult  energy  and  an  occa- 
sional lurid  flash  of  light,  but  with  small 
ministry  of  joy  or  beauty.  If  Shakespeare  as 
a  dramatist  was  "  for  all  time,"  Chapman 
as  an  original  poet  was  for  none.  His  un- 
paralleled obscurity  is  that  of  convulsive 
thought  which  never  clears  itself  save  in 
isolated  passages :  for  stately  Elizabethan 
commonplace  he  commonly  substitutes  a 
cryptic  discourse  which  suggests  profundity 
chiefly  by  being  unintelligible.  When  a  clear 
couplet  comes,  it  is  fine  in  the  Elizabethan 
way : 

No  pen  can  anything  eternal  write 

That  is  not  steeped  in  humour  of  the  night. 

But  he  will  without  scruple  trip  up  a  fluent 
sequence  for  an  archaistic  rhyme  : 

Time's  motion  being  like  the  reeling  sun's. 
Or  as  the  sea  reciprocally  nuis. 
Hath  brought  us  now  to  their  opinions 
As  in  our  garment  ancient  fashions 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      163 

Are  newly  worn  ;    and  as  sweet  poesy- 
Will  not  be  clad  in  her  supremacy 
With  those  strange  garments  (Rome's  hexameters) 
As  she  is  English  ;   but  in  right  prefers 
Our  native  robes  (put  on  with  skilful  hands, 
English  heroics)  to  those  antic  garlands. 

The  classic  measure,  dating  from  Chaucer,  is 
wilfully  flawed  with  an  archaic  disfigurement 
far  more  disturbing  than  any  pedantic  clas- 
sicism. Yet  when  we  turn  to  his  stanza- 
work  in  Ovid's  Banquet  of  Sense  (1595),  we 
feel  he  might  do  anything  in  technique  if  he 
would.  It  was  a  period  of  erotic  poems,  com- 
peting with  sonnets  ;  and  Chapman  can  be  as 
erotic  as  any  ;  but  he  has  no  need  of  such 
material  to  be  poetic  : 

O  Beauty,  how  attractive  is  thy  power  ! 

For  as  the  life's  heat  clings  about  the  heart, 
So  all  men's  hungry  eyes  do  haunt  thy  bower. 

Reigning  in  Greece,  Troy  swam  to  thee  in  art ; 
Removed  to  Troy,  Greece  followed  thee  in  fears. 

Thou  drew'st  each  sireless  sword,  each  childless  dart 
And  puirdst  the  towers  of  Troy  about  thine  ears  ; 

Shall  I  then  muse  that  thus  thou  drawest  me  ? 

No,  but  admire,  I  stand  thus  far  from  thee. 

But  he  was  to  devote  himself  in  the  main 
to  the  "  English  heroics  "  of  his  early  praise, 
and  to  win  his  fullest  meed  of  fame  by  raising 
to  a  new  power  and  splendour  the  old  verna- 
cular verse  of  fourteen  syllables.  His  coup- 
lets, far  as  they  are  from  the  calm  lucidity  of 
the  Augustan  age,  sound  the  very  note  of 


164      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

its  decadent  style  in  the  phrase  "  enamelled 
meads  "  :  his  English  "  fourteeners  "  were 
uncopied  and  inimitable. 

A  translation  of  Homer  had  been  attempted 
by  several  hands  before  1580  :  one  by  Byn- 
neman,  giving  ten  Books,  being  entered  for 
publication  in  that  year ;  and  one  of  ten 
Books,  made  from  the  French^  by  Arthur  Hall, 
being  published  in  the  following  year.  Drant, 
the  translator  of  two  books  of  Horace's 
Satires  (1566),  had  translated  four  Books  of 
Homer,  but  did  not  publish  his  work.  Hall's 
version,  which  no  modern  critic  or  historian 
appears  to  have  seen,  passed  out  of  sight  as 
a  complete  failure.  Chapman  thus  had  a 
free  field  ;  and  he  took  possession  so  power- 
fully that  not  till  Pope  did  any  one  try  to 
compete.  The  otherwise  insoluble  problem 
of  translating  the  Iliad  he  solved  by  turning 
it  into  a  ''  Homeristic  "  poem  in  the  old  native 
measure,  never  before  so  ennobled,  attaining 
with  it  a  kind  of  effect  quite  new  in  English 
poetry,  but  so  telling  in  its  kind,  in  virtue  of 
his  own  poetic  power  and  variety  of  rhythm, 
that  his  is  to  this  day  the  most  readable  of  all 
the  English  translations.  He  does  not  come 
off  very  well  in  the  loveliest  passages,  as  that 
at  the  end  of  the  eighth  Book,  where  he  loses 
the  supreme  simplicity  of  Homer  in  rhyme- 
seeking  ;  but  he  keeps  up  in  general  a  sounding 
and  sweeping  and  changing  rhythm  that  in 
its  own  kind  is  admirable.     As  here : 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      165 

Thus  charged  he  her  with  haste,  that  did  before  with 

haste  abound. 
Who  cast  herself  from  all  the  heights  with  which  steep 

heaven  is  crown'd. 
And  as  Jove,  brandishing  a  star,  which  men  a  comet 

call. 
Hurls  out  his  curled  hair  abroad,  that  from  his  brand 

exhale 
A  thousand  sparks  to  fleets  at  sea  and  every  mighty 

host. 
Of  all  presages  and  ill-haps  a  sign  mistrusted  most ; 
So  Pallas  fell  twixt  both  the  camps,  and  suddenly  was 

lost ; 
When  through  the  breasts  of  all  that  saw,  she  strook  a 

strong  amaze 
With  viewing  in  her  whole  descent  her  bright  and 

ominous  blaze. 

He  alters  his  original  as  often  as  he  sees  fit. 
"  Which  is  all  paraphrastical  in  my  transla- 
tion," he  curtly  remarks  at  the  end  of  one 
footnote.  In  the  "  Commentarius "  at  the 
ends  of  some  of  the  Books  the  Elizabethan 
poet  lets  himself  loose.  Jonson  himself  is 
not  so  pugnacious  ;  though  a  common  wrath 
at  the  impertinence  of  popular  and  other 
criticism  was  for  him  and  Chapman  a  bond 
of  amity.  Chapman  is  always  striving  and 
crying  aloud.  In  his  explosive  prefaces  he 
seems  to  quiver  with  fury  at  an  antagonism 
which  has  not  yet  had  the  chance  to  express 
itself,  but  which  he  fiercely  anticipates. 
"  We  have  example  sacred  enough,"  he  shouts, 
*'  that  true  Poesy's  humility,  poverty  and 
contempt,  are  badges  of  divinity,  not  vanity. 


166      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Bray  then,  and  bark  against  it,  ye  wolf-faced 
worldlings  ...  I  for  my  part  shall  ever 
esteem  it  much  more  manly  and  sacred,  in 
this  harmless  and  pious  study,  to  sit  till  I 
sink  into  my  grave,  than  shine  in  your  vain- 
glorious bubbles  and  impieties  ;  all  your  poor 
policies,  wisdoms,  and  their  trappings,  at  no 
more  valuing  than  a  musty  nut."  He  did 
protest  too  much.  It  has  been  suggested  that 
it  was  he  to  whom  Shakespeare  alluded  in 
the  86th  Sonnet  as  being,  with  "  the  full  proud 
sail  of  his  great  verse,  bound  for  the  prize  " 
of  his  patron.  On  that  view  the  greater  poet 
was  the  humbler — if  indeed  he  was  serious. 

In  Chapman's  version  of  the  Odyssey,  which 
appeared  in  the  year  of  Shakespeare's  death, 
the  "  full  proud  sail  "  is  furled.  The  heroic 
couplet  has  taken  the  place  of  the  fourteener, 
and  the  result  is  substantial  failure. 

Another  dramatist  of  the  earlier  flight, 
Thomas  Lodge,  shows  in  the  poetry  freely 
scattered  through  his  prose  romances  Rosa- 
lynde  and  A  Margarite  of  America  a  fertility 
of  metrical  form  and  ease  of  scansion  that 
might  have  resulted  in  some  memorable  poetry 
if  only  Lodge  had  had  something  vital  to 
sing.  Some  of  his  lines  are  good  enough  for 
anybody,  for  instance  : 

See  where  the  babes  of  memory  are  laid 
Under  the  shadow  of  Apollo's  tree. 

In  Commendation  of  a  Solitary  Life. 

But  though  he  produced  in  The  Complaint 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      167 

of  Elstred  (1593)  a  composition  in  the  taste  of 
the  Mirrour  for  Magistrates  and  of  Daniel  and 
Drayton  ;  and  in  Glaucus  and  Silla  (1589)  an 
elaborate  erotic  poem,  which  seems  to  have 
suggested  Shakespeare's  Venus  and  Adonis — 
besides  satires,  sonnets,  odes,  and  epistles — 
he  does  not  attain  to  the  category  of  the 
masters  in  any  one  form  ;  and  has  indeed 
never  been  made  accessible  to  the  ordinary 
reader  even  to  the  extent  to  which  Daniel  and 
Drayton  have.  It  is  but  fair  to  say  of  him 
that  while  in  his  longer  and  shorter  pieces 
alike  he  often  lays  under  contribution  the 
French  and  Italian  verse  of  his  day,  he  not 
seldom  improves  upon  it  to  the  extent  of 
yielding  us  a  very  spontaneous-seeming  and 
tuneful  English  poem  in  place  of  a  rather  stiff 
French  one ;  and  if  his  verse  were  but  col- 
lected in  the  ordinary  way  he  might  still  find 
a  considerable  audience.  As  it  is,  he  seems 
likely  to  be  best  remembered  by  the  single 
madrigal : 

Love  in  my  bosom  like  a  bee 
Doth  suck  his  sweet. 

And  indeed  it  is  by  such  felicities  as  that 
that  Elizabethan  literature  still  chiefly  appeals 
to  many  readers.  The  song-books  of  the  time, 
and  the  songs  scattered  through  the  plays, 
are  felt  to  keep  with  them  an  old-world  fra- 
grance which  no  other  age  has  recaptured. 
As  with  the  sonnets,  it  is  a  case  of  over-pro- 


168      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

duction,  with  but  a  percentage  of  perfection  ; 
yet  the  gems  suffice  to  give  lustre  to  the  whole. 
Taking  Elizabethan  together  with  Stuart 
drama,  we  are  bound  to  say  that  the  lyric 
note  is  best  maintained  by  the  playwrights, 
whose  dramatic  discipline  quickened  their 
pulses,  and  by  the  story-tellers,  who  seem  to 
have  felt  the  need  of  heightening  by  song 
the  effects  of  their  over- voluble  prose.  Apart 
from  a  few  fine  things  by  Wyatt  and  Surrey, 
the  art  of  delicate  lyric  begins  in  England  in 
that  age  ;  and  Lilly  among  the  dramatists 
should  have  the  credit  of  showing  the  way, 
though  he  was  soon  surpassed.  Shakespeare's 
"  Hark,  hark,  the  lark  at  heaven's  gate  sings  " 
is  distilled  from  a  line  of  his.  Greene,  who 
put  no  serious  songs  in  his  plays,  lit  up  his 
tales  with  many,  some  of  them  wholly  charm- 
ing, as  the  favourite  lullaby. 

Weep  not,  my  wanton,  smile  upon  my  knee. 

Nashe,  who  was  too  essentially  a  master  of 
prose  to  be  quite  a  poet,  has  one  line  in  a  song 
in  Summers  Last  Will : 

Go  not  yet  hence,  bright  soul  of  the  sad  year, 

which  strangely  well  fulfils  the  sense  of  "  the 
lyrical  cry."  Even  Peele  can  warble ;  and 
the  detached  "  sonnet," 

His  golden  locks  time  hath  to  silver  turned, 
keeps  for  him  a  safe  place  in  the  Elizabethan 


POETRY   AFTER   SPENSER       169 

bead-roll.  And  though  Shakespeare  here,  as 
in  sonnet  and  drama,  has  done  the  finest  things, 
and  is  to  be  crowned  for  the  perfect  loveliness 
of 

Take,  oh  take  those  lips  away, 

while  Fletcher  is  probably  to  be  credited  with 
the  incongruous  second  stanza  (in  which  the 
woman's  voice  turns  to  a  man's) : 

Hide,  oh  hide  those  hills  of  snow, 

it  must  be  granted  that  Fletcher's  fertility  and 
felicity  in  lyric  place  him  quite  in  the  front 
rank.  The  Faithful  Shepherdess  is  as  rich  in 
song  as  it  is  poor  in  drama ;  and  he  has  so 
many  good  things  elsewhere  that  it  remains 
possible  to  doubt  whether  he  or  Shakespeare 
wrote 

Boses,  their  sharp  spines  being  gone 

in  The  Two  Noble  Kinsmen  ;  though  the  line 
"  With  harebells  dim  "  seems  to  have  the  very 
signature  of  him  among  whose  best-loved 
flowers  were  "  violets  dim." 

Beaumont  has  one  signal  success  : 

Shake  off  your  heavy  trance 

And  leap  into  a  dance 

Such  as  no  mortal  used  to  tread : 

Fit  only  for  Apollo 
To  play  to,  and  the  moon  to  lead. 

And  all  the  stars  to  follow  I 


170      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

And  Dekker  and  Heywood  have  their  pro- 
minent place  in  the  choir,  the  former  with  his 

Art  thou  poor,  yet  hast  thou  golden  slumbers, 

in  Patient  Grissel,  and  the  songs  in  the  Shoe- 
maker^s  Holiday  and  Old  Fortunatus ;  the 
latter  with  his 

Ye  little  birds  that  sit  and  sing 

in  The  Fair  Maid  of  the  Exchange^  and  the 
delightful 

Pack,  clouds,  away,  and  welcome  day  ! 

in  his  Raye  of  Lucrece.  Anthony  Munday,  who 
in  drama  has  left  but  a  reputation  for  unam- 
bitious handicraft,  would  seem  to  have  achieved 
the  limpid  rustic  song  on  the  dead  Robin  Hood 
in  his  and  Chettle's  play  of  1601.  Rare  Ben 
Jonson,  it  is  true,  hardly  ever  strikes  the  desir- 
able note  in  his  plays ;  but  he  has  left  us  that 
enduring  song,  "  Drink  to  me  only  with  thine 
eyes,"  so  wonderfully  compounded  from  dead 
bones  of  pedantry. 

Of  the  professed  song-writers,  the  most 
memorable  is  Thomas  Campion,  Doctor  of 
Physic,  if  we  credit  him  with  the  whole  of  the 
verse  in  the  first  Book  of  Airs  (1601)  by  him 
and  his  friend  Philip  Rosseter.  Ostensibly, 
each  contributed  twenty-one  lyrics,  and  Ros- 
seter the  whole  of  the  airs;  but  the  critics 
are  more  or  less  confident  in  ascribing  to 
Campion  all  of  the  verse,  and  half  of  the  music. 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER      171 

It  is  noteworthy  that  some  of  the  best  poems, 
such  as. 

And  would  you  see  my  mistress'  face  ? 

are  in  the  second  section,  ascribed  to  Ros- 
seter  ;  but  there  is  a  similarity  in  the  work 
which  goes  to  support  the  view  that  he  meant 
to  claim  merely  the  tunes.  A  certain  in- 
security of  rhythm  pervades  both  sections, 
as  if  the  creation  of  the  poems  with  the  music 
made  the  author  partly  inattentive  to  the 
laws  of  verbal  metre.  Indeed,  this  composer 
of  songs  with  words  professed  only  to  write, 
"  after  the  fashion  of  the  times,  ear-pleasing 
rhymes,  without  art,"  and  only  once,  in  a  set 
of  Sapphics,  to  copy  the  ancients  who  "  tied 
themselves  strictly  to  the  number  and  value 
of  their  syllables  "  ;  and  yet  the  sapphics,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  are  far  from  being  strict.  In 
the  following  year  Campion  published  06- 
servations  in  the  Art  of  English  Poesie^  "  where- 
in it  is  demonstratively  proved,  and  by 
example  confirmed,  that  the  English  tongue 
will  receive  eight  several  kinds  of  numbers, 
proper  to  itself,  which  are  all  in  this  book  set 
forth,  and  were  never  before  this  time  by  any 
man  attempted.^ ^  The  book  is  dedicated  to 
the  Lord  High  Treasurer,  Lord  Buckhurst, 
to  whom  the  author  explains  that 

Poesy  in  all  kind  of  speaking  is  the  chief  beginner 
and  maintainer  of  eloquence,  not  only  helping  the 
ear  with  the  acquaintance  of  sweet  numbers,  but  also 


172      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

raising  the  mind  in  a  more  high  and  lofty  conceit. 
For  this  end  have  I  studied  to  induce  a  true  form  of 
versifying  into  our  language :  for  the  vulgar  and 
unartificial  [  =  unskiKul]  custom  of  riming  hath,  I 
know,  deterred  many  excellent  wits  from  the  exercise 
of  English  poesy. 

It  is  a  comfort  to  find  that  poetry  is  for 
once  not  to  be  extolled  as  a  moral  function  ; 
but  no  theorist  ever  more  completely  failed 
to  make  good  his  professed  purpose  than  did 
Campion.  His  eight  forms  of  verse  "  proper 
to  "  English  are  but  mechanical  performances 
in  classical  metres,  with  the  marked  exception 
of  the  first  example,  which,  describ  d  as 
"  licentiate  iambics,"  is  simply  the  now  estab- 
lished English  blank  verse,  written  with  a  due 
admixture  of  iambs  and  trochees,  with  an 
occasional  dactyl.  Other  examples  are  in 
what  Campion  calls  ''  our  iambic  dimetre,  or 
English  march,"  which  runs : 

Raving  war,  begot 
In  the  thirsty  sands 
Of  the  Libyan  Isles  ; 

and  the  rest  are  in  more  or  less  "  strict  " 
trochaics,  elegiacs,  sapphics,  and  "  a  kind  of 
Anacreontic  verse."  The  mystery  is,  how  the 
poet  came  to  suppose  that  he  was  the  first  to 
produce  his  so-called  "  licentiate  iambics." 
Apparently  he  had  seen  no  blank-verse  plays, 
and  knew  not  of  Surrey's  version  of  Virgil. 
In  point  of  fact  he  writes  a  fair  but  stiff  "  end- 
stopped  "  blank  verse,  which  at  that  very 


POETRY  AFTER  SPENSER       173 

time  was  being  triumphantly  superseded  in 
the  theatres. 

The  book,  naturally,  had  not  the  slightest 
effect  on  anybody's  practice,  the  author  him- 
self tranquilly  disregarding  afterwards  his 
own  precepts.  It  is  indeed  far  from  certain 
that  he  had  ever  felt  any  serious  concern  for 
them.  He  was  a  cultured  eccentric,  a  lean 
physician,  who  professed  to  envy  the  fat ; 
and  a  man  capable  of  that  make-believe  would 
not  stick  at  trifles  in  theory-mongering. 
Clever,  neatly  written,  and  essentially  wrong- 
headed,  the  essay  was  duly  and  politely  con- 
futed by  Samuel  Daniel  in  an  Apologie  for 
Byrne  in  the  same  year  ;.  and  Campion,  living 
on  till  1620,  produced  several  more  ''  Books  of 
Airs  "  in  which  he  presents  a  multitude  of 
lyrics  all  in  rhyme,  which  he  handles  with  an 
increasing  competence ;  also  several  masques ; 
and  never  an  unrhymed  poem  of  any  de- 
scription. He  died,  it  would  seem,  of  the 
plague,  and  left  "  all  he  had  unto  Mr.  Philip 
Rosseter,  and  wished  that  his  estate  had  been 
far  more."     It  amounted  to  £22. 

Campion  has  not  left  us  one  really  great 
song  ;  and  he  made  many  that  lack  distinc- 
tion. But  he  maintains  a  level  of  independent 
poetic  feeling  and  graceful  execution  that  en- 
titles him  to  be  remembered  as  an  estimable 
and  accomplished  Elizabethan,  one  of  the 
many  literary  and  scholarly  physicians  of  that 
time.     With  his  skill  and  originality  in  music 


174      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

and  his  scholarly  interest  in  poetic  experiment, 
he  is  indeed  one  of  the  ornaments  of  an  age 
in  which  the  love  and  practice  of  the  arts  of 
song  were  too  general  to  be  called  dilettantism; 
and  which  thus  still  gives  out  for  us,  as  it  were, 
a  far-away  sound  of  viols  and  flutes. 

And  that  is  a  pleasanter  thing  to  be  re- 
membered by  than  the  efforts  at  satire  which 
mark  the  last  decade  of  the  sixteenth  century. 
There  is  some  dispute  as  to  whether  Joseph 
Hall  or  John  Marston  be — as  each  claimed 
for  himself — the  first  satirist  proper  in  the 
field  of  English  poetry.  In  point  of  fact  both 
Wj-att  andS^urrey  had  attempted  that  literary 
exercise,  to  say  nothing  of  Skelton  and  Roye, 
the  assailants  of  Cardinal  Wolsey ;  Gas- 
coigne's  Steel  Glass,  which  must  be  assigned 
to  that  order,  is  also  prior  ;  and  even  Lodge's 
Fig  for  Momus  anticipates  the  rival  claimants. 
For  that  matter,  Spenser's  Mother  Hubberd's 
Tale  dates  from  1591,  whereas  Hall's  satires 
were  published  in  1597,  and  Marston's  Scourge 
of  Villainy  in  1598.  As  between  Hall  and 
Marston  the  ''  point  of  precedency,"  as  Doctor 
Johnson  would  say,  is  of  no  great  importance. 
Hall,  who  became  a  bishop,  has  three  of  his 
devotional  sayings  standing  to  his  credit  in 
the  Dictionary  of  Familiar  Quotations,  but 
none  from  his  satires  ;  and  Marston  has  none 
at  all.  The  substantial  differences  between 
them  are  that  Hall  is  decent,  and  Marston 
otherwise ;    and  that  the  latter  by  dint  of 


POETRY  AFTER   SPENSER      175 

raucous  violence  makes  the  more  powerful 
and  unpleasant  impression.  But  neither  can 
maintain  the  epigrammatic  force  and  finish 
which  alone  can  make  satirical  verse  memor- 
able ;  and  Marston's  violence,  which  always 
sets  up  the  suggestion  of  a  vulgar  moralist 
pelting  his  victims  with  high-smelling  mis- 
siles, arouses  dislike  rather  than  amuse- 
ment.    Sa.tire   as   distinguished   from   abuse 

was    not    rPflHy    an    FJizg.fipITi^^ 

ment ;   itjwas  to  be  cultivated  in  an  age  with 

fewer  iHusions,  less  genius,  and  less  poetry. 


CHAPTER   VIII 

SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare  enters  the  dramatic  lists, 
obscurely  enough,  some  short  time  before  the 
death  of  Greene.  We  cannot  say  exactly  in 
what  year  he  came  to  London  from  his  native 
Stratford-on-Avon  ;  but  the  presumption  is 
that  it  was  about  1588,  and  that  he  had  already 
become  an  actor  in  the  company  originally 
attached  to  the  Earl  of  Leicester,  which  on 
that  nobleman's  death  was  taken  over  by 
Lord  Strange,  and  later,  after  reconstruction, 
became  known  as  the  Lord  Chan^berlain's 
men.  A  simple  actor  the  youth  must  have 
been  for  several  years,  and  there  is  no  evi- 
dence that  he  was  ever  reckoned  a  great  one — 
a  matter  in  which  he  is  on  a  par  with  Ben 


176      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Jonson  and  other  playwrights  of  the  time  who 
occasionally  acted.  There  is,  in  fact,  no  case 
on  record  of  a  great  actor  who  was  also  a  great 
writer ;  and  men  have  accordingly  been  apt 
to  undervalue  Shakespeare's  training  on  the 
boards  as  a  factor  in  his  dramatic  preparation. 
It  was  probably,  however,  of  capital  im- 
portance in  his  artistic  evolution.  AH  forms 
of  art  and  science  can  ultimately  be  seen  to 
be  perfected  by  way  of  an  intensifying  of 
thought  and  feeling,  in  which  the  data  are  re- 
felt  and  re-considered.  The  deepening  may 
come  through  simple  iteration  of  the  pro- 
cesses by  a  faculty  that  ripens  with  time — 
the  evolution  of  the  individual ;  or  by  the 
advent  of  new  faculty,  which  sees  and  sensates 
freshly — the  evolution  of  the  race.  But 
genius  is  always  conditioned,  and  Shakespeare 
in  Sidney's  place  would  not  have  been  the 
Shakespeare  we  possess.  Marlowe  could  not 
as  an  experienced  actor  have  produced  the 
drama  with  which  he  began  ;  he  would  have 
seen  such  matter  to  be  poetic  recitation  rather 
than  the  expression  of  character  in  action. 
Shakespeare,  with  his  unique  powers  in  course 
of  growth,  had  to  undergo  the  provocation  of 
having  to  declaim  and  hearing  declaimed  the 
verse  of  poets  who  were  outside  rather  than 
inside  their  subject :  whatever  his  mimetic 
gift,  he  must  have  wanted  to  improve  on  that : 
the  less  the  mimetic  faculty,  perhaps,  the 
more  would  it  crave  naturalness  of  phrase 


SHAKESPEARE  177 

and  of  character-type,  even  in  the  poetic  form. 
MoUere's  is  a  parallel  case.  The  course  of 
artistic  advance  in  the  case  of  Kyd,  Greene, 
and  Marlowe,  had  been  by  transition  from 
remote  to  near  types  of  personage — from 
Tamburlaine  and  Orlando,  the  unknown  life 
of  the  past  or  of  a  wholly  imaginary  Spain, 
to  modern  and  near  forms — Arden,  Alice, 
Faustus,  Dorothea,  English  kings  and  Eng- 
lish nobles.  Thus  alone  could  imagination 
for  them  be  vitalized.  Shakespeare,  with  his 
higher  faculty,  made  yet  another  step  towards 
reality.  For  him  realization  was  at  once 
objective  and  subjective :  the  more  real 
character-types  had  to  pass  the  crucible  of 
the  actor — himself  in  this  case  the  greatest 
poet  of  all. 

His  preparation  was  all  the  better  for  being 
non-academic  :  he  had  no  august  conventions 
to  outgrow.  He  appears  to  have  had  an 
ordinary  Elizabethan  grammar-school  educa- 
tion, and  thereafter  to  have  helped  in  the 
somewhat  miscellaneous  business  of  his  father, 
John  Shakespeare,  who  acted  as  tanner, 
glover,  and  butcher  for  the  village.  It  is  not 
yet  certain  whether  the  father's  later  record 
of  fines  and  disabilities  stood  for  mismanage- 
ment in  business,  or  for  recusancy  to  the 
ecclesiastical  administration,  which  was 
aggressively  hostile  to  nonconformity.  All 
that  seems  clear  is  that  John  Shakespeare 
passed  from  a  period  of  local  success,  during 

12 


178      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

which  he  was  for  a  time  bailiff  of  the  town,  to 
one  of  relative  depression  and  anxiety  ;  and 
that  the  young  William,  making  an  early  and 
hasty  marriage,  found  it  difficult  to  maintain 
his  wife  and  three  children,  and  accordingly 
went  on  the  stage.  It  is  obviously  likely 
that,  with  his  faculties,  he  had  taken  an 
especial  interest  in  the  travelling  companies 
who  visited  Stratford  ;  and  that  such  a  re- 
cruit would  be  welcomed  by  the  players, 
whether  on  tour  or  in  London,  when  they 
had  a  vacancy.  And  it  seems  just  as  likely 
that  if  his  father's  and  his  own  affairs  had 
gone  smoothly  at  Stratford  he  might  never 
have  figured  as  a  poet  or  dramatist  at  all. 

It  is  in  1592,  in  Greene's  deathbed  pamphlet 
of  repentance,  reproach,  and  vituperation, 
that  we  have  the  first  trace  of  Shakespeare 
as  a  ''  Shake-scene,"  a  Johannes  Fac-totum 
of  his  company,  who  could  "  bombast  out  a 
blank- verse  '*  for  them  with  a  facility  which 
made  him  an  unwelcome  rival  to  the  regular 
playwrights.  That  is  to  say,  he  was  already 
adapting  and  recasting  other  men's  work, 
and  probably  collaborating  either  with  out- 
siders or  with  some  of  the  playwrights  who 
presumed  to  write  for  a  stage  that  was  sup- 
plied by  "  university  wits "  with  its  prin- 
cipal pieces.  But  Shakespeare's  own  express 
avowal,  in  the  dedication  of  his  poem  on 
Venus  and  Adonis  (1593),  that  that  poem  is 
the  "  first  heir  of  his  invention,"  precludes  us 


SHAKESPEARE  179 

from  believing  that  before  that  date  he  had 
composed  an  entire  play  of  his  own.  That 
declaration  we  cannot  rationally  refuse  to 
accept ;  and  only  in  the  light  of  it  can  we 
understand  the  nature  of  his  early  work. 

In  almost  all  of  the  plays  presumably  pro- 
duced before  J 595  we  actually  find,  as  it 
happens,  evidences  of  variety  of  composition. 
In  Love's  Labour's  Lost,  supposed  to  be  his 
first  comedy,  there  is  a  quantity  of  matter 
which  points  to  outside  collaboration,  and 
might  conceivably  have  been  furnished  by 
the  young  actor's  patron.  Lord  Southampton, 
and  his  friends.  The  phrase  ''  Priscian,  a 
little  scratched,"  as  a  comment  on  false 
Latin,  would  have  come  strangely  from  a 
youth  who  had  left  school  about  fourteen  or 
fifteen,  and  who  had,  by  the  testimony  of 
Jonson,  ''  small  Latin  and  less  Greek."  In 
the  early  Comedy  of  Errors  we  observe  marked 
differences  of  versification  in  the  first  act, 
the  opening  scene  being  written  in  mechani- 
cally regular  "  end-stopped "  verse,  with 
exactly  ten  syllables,  save  in  three  Instances ; 
while  in  the  second  we  have  "  double  "  or 
"  feminine  "  endings,  that  is,  extra  syllables, 
in  25  out  of  103  lines.  In  the  Two  Gentlemen 
of  Verona,  also  an  early  play,  the  father  of 
Proteus  appears  in  the  first  act,  and  never 
again ;  and  Proteus  is  sent  with  others  "  to 
salute  the  emperor,"  who  is  not  again  heard 
of.     Apparently  there  has  been  reconstruc- 


180    ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

tion,  perhaps  a  combination  of  two  plots. 
As  the  play  stands,  it  is  visibly  curtailed  in 
the  denouement,  where,  further,  a  transcriber's 
or  a  printer's  error  has  put  into  the  mouth 
of  Valentine  two  impossible  lines,  belonging 
to  another  character.  On  the  theme  of 
Romeo  and  Juliet,  yet  again,  we  know  there 
was  a  play  before  1560  ;  and  this,  there  is 
reason  to  think,  was  built  upon  by  Shake- 
speare, probably  through  an  intermediary 
adaptation.  As  the  play  stands,  independent 
critics  have  been  impressed  by  the  presence 
of  different  styles,  though  no  one  doubts  that 
the  really  fine  work  is  Shakespeare's. 

There  is  now  little  doubt,  further,  though 
there  is  not  unanimity,  concerning  the  non- 
Shakespearean  character  of  the  first  part  of 
Henry  VI,  and  the  presence  of  much  of  other 
men's  work  in  the  second  and  third  parts, 
which  are  obviously  adaptations  from  two 
earlier  plays,  still  extant.  Similarly,  the 
Taming  of  the  Shrew,  which  was  preceded  by 
a  Taming  of  a  Shrew,  is  itself  in  the  main 
pre-Shakespearean,  the  master-hand  being 
doubtfully  traceable  only — if  at  all — in  the 
Katherine  and  Petruchio  scenes,  which  are 
at  most  worked  over  by  him. 

Such  being  the  young  playwright's  practice 
at  his  outset,  we  are  warned  to  surmise  that 
in  the  later  plays,  in  which  he  more  or  less 
completely  gives  us  his  own  work,  he  is  still,  as 
a  rule  or  often,  rewriting  old  plots.     His  Fal- 


SHAKESPEARE  181 

staff  we  know  to  have  been  superimposed  on 
a  previous  figure  which,  to  the  expressed  dis- 
content of  the  descendants,  was  named  after 
the  famous  Lollard  Sir  Thomas  Oldcastle ; 
and  the  whole  double  play  of  Henry  IV  is 
presumptively  a  recast.  It  is  hardly  possible 
that  Shakespeare  originally  planned  the  ill- 
conceived  and  jarring  scene  of  Prince  Henry's 
donning  of  the  crown,  or,  indeed,  the  loose 
movement  of  the  whole,  though  his  hand  has 
everywhere  been  laid  on  the  verse  and  on 
the  prose  comedy.  But  even  the  latter  was 
wrought  piecemeal ;  Mrs.  Quickly  being  a 
wife  in  the  first  part  and  a  widow  of  long 
standing  in  the  second,  though  there  has  been 
no  break  in  the  continuity  of  the  action,  and 
no  mention  of  the  hostess's  change  of  status. 
King  John,  in  turn,  is  a  rewriting  of  The 
Troublesome  Raigne  of  King  John,  which,  in 
the  main,  was  probably  the  work  of  Lodge. 
There  is  a  presumption  that  even  Richard  II 
is  a  recast  of  an  older  play,  perhaps  written 
by  Peele,  of  whom  there  are  traces  in  the 
diction ;  and  there  are  various  reasons  for 
thinking  that  Julius  Ccesar,  in  which  the  style 
is  so  often  suggestive  of  other  hands,  is  a  re- 
construction by  Shakespeare  of  a  previous 
play  which  may  have  been  in  two  parts — 
possibly  that  which  we  know  to  have  been 
written  for  Henslowe  in  1602  by  Dekker, 
Drayton,  Munday,  Webster,  and  Middleton. 
In  the  case  of  Hamlet  we  know  beyond 


182      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

reasonable  doubt  that  there  was  a  previous 
play  by  Thomas  Kyd,  written  at  least  as  early 
as  1588  ;  and  of  this  earlier  work  there  are 
some  apparent  traces  in  the  pirated  First 
Quarto  of  1602.  Again,  with  regard  to  the 
Merchant  of  Venice^  we  know  from  Stephen 
Gosson's  School  of  Abuse  that  as  early  as 
1579  there  was  on  the  stage  a  play  containing 
something  like  the  casket  scene,  and  based 
on  the  Shylock  motive.  King  Lear^  in  turn, 
we  know  to  be  a  complete  recomposition  on 
the  main  motive  of  an  older  King  Leir  and 
his  Three  Daughters  ;  and  it  is  probable  that 
both  Othello  and  Macbeth  were  similarly  sug- 
gested by  previous  dramas.  Not  till  Corio- 
lanus  (1608)  do  we  certainly  have  a  tragedy 
primarily  composed  by  Shakespeare  from 
mere  book-material,  as  As  You  Like  It  had 
been  framed  upon  Lodge's  prose  story  of 
Rosalynde.  Measure  for  Measure  (1604),  we 
know,  builds  upon  the  Promos  and  Cassandra 
of  Whetstone,  with  probably  another  play 
between  ;  and  the  chances  are  that  The  Two 
Gentlemen,  Much  Ado  about  Nothing,  and 
AlVs  Well  that  ends  Well,  were  founded  upon 
previous  plays  by  Greene.  It  is  here  that  the 
challenge  of  Greene's  champion  in  1594  be- 
comes pressing.  These  are  the  plays  in  our 
Shakespeare  which  are  most  hkely  to  have 
been  of  Greene's  planning  as  regards  their 
plots ;  and  if  we  disregard  the  challenge  in 
respect  of  them,  on  the  score  that  we  have  no 


SHAKESPEARE  183 

direct  evidence  on  the  subject,  we  in  effect 
ignore  it  altogether  as  regards  Shakespeare, 
the  only  playwright  to  whom  it  appears  to 
point  at  all  clearly.  There  are  really  strong 
grounds  for  regarding  these  plays  as  adapta- 
tions, however  superior  may  be  the  execution 
to  the  common  run  of  Greene's.  The  most 
carefully  finished  of  all  the  comedies,  Twelfth 
Nighty  is  the  most  homogeneous  in  style  and 
matter ;  but  we  cannot  say  that  its  plot- 
motives  were  of  Shakespeare's  framing.  The 
motive  of  a  brother  and  a  sister  masquerading 
in  male  clothes,  and  that  of  the  disguised  girl 
serving  as  page  to  the  man  she  loves — already 
used  in  the  Two  Gentlemen — were  standing 
conventions  in  continental  fiction,  and  must 
have  been  long  familiar  on  the  stage. 

There  is  still  a  natural  reluctance  to  face 
the  fact  of  all  this  indebtedness  on  the  part 
of  the  supreme  dramsaist  to  a  number  of  his 
predecessors  for  botn  themes  and  character- 
types.  But  the  recognition  of  the  debt  really 
puts  in  a  clearer  light  the  greatness  of  the 
faculty  which  so  marvellously  transmuted 
common  clay  into  so  much  of  fine  gold  ;  and 
it  reduces  to  intelligibility  at  the  same  time 
the  otherwise  occult  process  of  the  production 
of  such  a  mass  of  fine  and  great  work  in  a 
few  years  by  an  actor  of  no  great  culture, 
and  presumably  without  the  leisure  for  such 
a  variety  of  reading  and  knowledge  as  would 
be  required  for  the  initiation  of  such  a  multi- 


184      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

tude  of  plots.  To  know  Shakespeare,  we 
must  think  of  him  as  the  actor-partner  cater- 
ing for  his  company,  concerned  primarily  to 
find  themes  and  frame  plots  that  will' "  draw," 
and  driven  alike  by  his  genius  and  by  his 
experience  as  an  actor  to  make  the  characters 
lifelike.  To  the  poetic  declamation  which 
the  age  and  the  blank-verse  form  demanded, 
he  was  trained  by  his  years  of  work  on  the 
boards ;  and  in  that  form  he  rapidly  deve- 
loped a  mastery  of  rhythm  that  left  all  his 
contemporaries  behind.  But  he  is  no  less 
their  superior  in  sheer  play-making,  Alike  in 
poetry,  in  perception  of  character,  and  in  the 
eye  for  dramatic  effect,  he  soon  far  excelled 
them  all ;  though  he  learned  not  a  little  from 
others  even  to  the  end.  The  opening  scene  in 
the  second  part  of  Henry  /F,  in  which  the 
fears  of  Northumberland  are  alternately  laid 
and  stirred,  till  the  crushing  truth  is  reached, 
makes  a  kind  of  psychic  effect  at  which 
previous  Tudor  dramatists  had  never  even 
aimed ;  and  the  character-drawing  in  the 
part  of  Shallow,  done  for  its  own  sake,  is  no 
less  an  innovation  by  the  new  master.  Lack- 
ing as  he  did  the  university  culture  which 
in  some  degree  had  been  enjoyed  by  most  of 
them,  he  rather  gained  than  lost  thereby, 
being  thrown  for  his  training  upon  his  own 
powers  and  the  living  models  with  which  he 
was  supplied,  whereas  they  had  been  biased 
by  their  schooling,   and  were  untrained  to 


SHAKESPEARE  185 

meet  the  real  needs  of  the  stage.  But  in 
sheer  power  of  reflection  aUke  upon  art  and 
upon  Hfe  he  was  also  gifted  beyond  their 
scope.  Always  he  transcends  them  in  crafts- 
manship and  verisimilitude  no  less  than  in 
force  and  delicacy.  Taking  over  from  Greene 
or  Peele  plots  which  no  manipulation  could 
make  wholly  satisfactory,  he  still  produces 
something  more  coherent  as  well  as  more 
delightful  than  anything  left  by  either  of 
them ;  and  whereas  Greene  gave  him  a  real 
lead  in  respect  of  his  woman  characters  in 
two  or  three  plays,  Shakespeare  from  the  first 
exhibits  a  relative  mastery  in  that  kind,  even 
in  working  over  other  men's  draughts.  The 
girls  in  the  Two  Gentlemen  and  the  Midsummer 
Nights  Dream^  the  women  in  the  Comedy  of 
Errors^  are  in  their  comparatively  slight  way 
drawn  with  an  original  sureness  of  touch  ; 
and  soon,  in  Juliet  and  Beatrice  and  Portia, 
he  has  far  surpassed  his  predecessor. 

His  full  superiority  can  best  be  realized  by 
studying  first  a  great  play  in  which  he  was 
hampered  by  his  raw  material,  and  next  one 
in  which  he  put  the  model  aside  and  took  only 
the  theme,  working  it  out  for  himself.  In 
Hamlet,  the  most  famous  of  his  plays,  he  was 
certainly  hampered  by  the  previous  tragedy 
of  Kyd,  which  he  recast.  In  that,  the  assumed 
madness  of  the  hero,  remotely  derived  from 
an  old  saga,  was  matter  for  mirth,  as  mad- 
ness always  was  to  the  rude  and  crude  Eliza- 


186      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

bethan  audience  ;  and  the  added  madness  of 
Ophelia  would  serve  the  same  purpose.  The 
first  he  turns  to  truly  tragic  ends,  and  the 
second  he  makes  matter  of  pity  sind  tears, 
even  as  he  had  subtly  touched  with  new 
sympathy  his  presentment  of  the  contemned 
and  vindictive  Jew  in  the  Merchant  of  Venice. 
In  point  of  delicacy  and  vividness  of  character 
delineation,  it  need  hardly  be  said,  Hamlet 
transcends  all  previous  tragedy :  the  por- 
traiture is  as  freshly  powerful  as  the  versifica- 
tion. Still  there  remain  incongruities  in- 
volved in  the  structure  of  the  original.  Ham- 
let's brutal  words  over  the  slain  Polonius, 
and  his  savage  motive  for  sparing  the  praying 
King,  remain  on  the  old  barbaric  plane  ;  and 
the  placing  of  the  "To  be  "  soliloquy,  with 
its  reverie  on  the  "  undiscovered  country," 
after  the  scenes  in  which  Hamlet  has  actu- 
ally met  the  *'  returned  traveller,"  tells  of 
readjustment  which  missed  coherence.  The 
barbaric  plot  discords  with  the  brooding 
psychology  which  now  pervades  it.  Perhaps 
in  Othello,  where  again  the  characterization 
surpasses  in  intensity  everything  done  by 
previous  men,  the  perplexity  aroused  as  to 
the  motives  of  lago  is  similarly  to  be  accounted 
for  by  a  crude  original ;  though  we  cannot 
be  sure  that  Shakespeare  had  not  known 
"  Italianate  "  devils  of  lago's  brand.  In  any 
case  the  plot  is  likely  to  be  borrowed,  even  if 
refined  upon :   it  is  on  the  side  of  plot  strue- 


SHAKESPEARE  187 

ture  that  Shakespeare  is  least  original ;  and 
that  of  Othello  is  impossibly  "  telescoped  "  as 
it  stands.  It  is  in  the  astonishing  lifelikeness 
of  the  great  scenes  ;  in  the  new  mimetic 
imagination  seen  at  work  in  such  touches  as 
Emilia's  reiterated  question  "  My  husband  ?  " 
that  the  player  reveals  his  mastery  in  his  craft. 
But  in  Lear^  the  most  overpowering  tragedy 
of  the  modern  world,  we  see  him  refusing 
even  to  be  trammelled  by  other  men's  designs. 
The  old  Leir  is  quite  a  tolerable  play  for  its 
time,  the  fairly  mature  work,  it  may  be,  of 
Kyd  and  Lodge.  But  Shakespeare  about 
1605  was  in  a  mood  which  spurned  their 
mixture  of  serious  comedy  and  farce.  He 
simply  took  the  legendary  motive  and  put 
the  old  play  in  the  waste-paper  basket, 
creating  a  new  tale  in  which  evil  and  good 
clash  and  grapple  with  ah  intensity  of  action 
and  feeling  which  would  have  shrivelled  up 
the  first  framework.  Here  there  are  no 
ambiguities.  The  poet's  vision  plays  with  a 
terrible  lucidity  on  all  the  passions  of  all 
the  characters  :  the  erring  Lear  is  dashed  on 
destruction  by  his  own  ungovernable  tempera- 
ment ;  the  noble  Cordelia  abets  the  tragedy 
by  the  hereditary  obstinacy  in  which  alone 
she  is  of  kin  with  her  house  ;  the  good  pay 
their  penalties  even  as  do  the  wicked  ;  and  in 
the  frightful  comment  of  Edgar  in  the  fifth 
act  on  the  penalty  of  his  blinded  father  we 
seem  to  see  Shakespeare  for  once  thrown  from 


188      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

the  poise  of  sanity  in  a  flash  of  fierce  scorn  of 
all  human  folly,  his  own  perhaps  included. 

In  that  mood  he  might  well  do  his  part  in 
Timon — a  play  in  which  he  has  collaborated 
with  or  incompletely  revised  another  man, 
as  he  did  in  Pericles,  But  in  Coriolanus  we 
see  him  again  bent  on  taking  elbow-room  for 
his  own  genius,  with  the  result  that  on  the 
basis  of  Plutarch  he  builds  another  great 
artistic  whole,  wherein  nearly  every  character 
is  limned  with  a  masterly  power  ;  and  the 
central  figure  tells  with  more  than  Marlowe's 
force  the  great  tragic  truth,  "  'Tis  in  ourselves 
that  we  are  thus  or  thus."  Framed  as  it  was 
without  any  intermediary  model,  this  play 
serves  equally  with  Lear  to  reveal  the  dramatic 
supremacy  of  Shakespeare.  In  that,  he  had 
discarded  the  types  of  the  play  which  sug- 
gested his,  utterly  eclipsing  them  from  the 
start :  in  this,  turning  a  classic  narrative 
into  drama,  he  visualizes  and  vitalizes  his 
personages  as  no  dramatist  had  ever  done 
before.  With  perhaps  the  exception  of  TuUus 
Aufidius,  whose  psychology  was  probably 
meant  to  be  illuminated  by  the  temperament 
of  the  actor,  they  stand  out  like  so  many 
studies  of  actual  people,  varying  in  tone  and 
manner  even  as  in  character.  The  two  con- 
trasted types  of  Volumnia  and  Virgilia,  the 
mother  and  the  wife  of  Coriolanus,  are  not  to 
be  matched  even  in  Shakespeare's  gallery  for 
the  swift  certainty  with  which  they  are  con- 


SHAKESPEARE  189 

ceived  and  portrayed ;  and  in  the  former 
there  is  forced  upon  us  with  a  subtle  insistence 
something  that  Plutarch  did  not  tell,  the 
part  played  by  the  high-spirited  and  high- 
minded  yet  unwise  mother  in  fostering  her 
son's  imperious  spirit  up  to  the  point  at 
which  it  so  masters  his  life  that  she  is  in  the 
end  forced  to  be  his  destroyer,  to  save  him 
from  himself.  Her  complete  unconsciousness 
of  the  nature  of  her  work,  alike  in  the  past  and 
in  the  crowning  crisis,  is  a  new  conception  in 
the  way  of  criticism  of  life  ;  and  it  is  wrought 
out  in  wholly  dramatic  fashion,  without  a 
word  of  comment  from  the  dramatist,  who 
leaves  us  to  read  his  revelation  as  we  read 
that  of  life  itself. 

In  comparison  with  Volumnia,  Virgilia 
seems  at  first  a  supererogatory  creation,  vividly 
sketched  in  for  the  sheer  love  of  character- 
drawing.  She  is  powerless  to  affect  the 
action ;  yet  she  is  characterized  in  the  third 
scene  of  the  first  act,  with  the  most  perfect 
clearness,  as  at  once  wholly  womanly  in  con- 
trast with  her  masterful  mother-in-law,  and 
still  gently  determined  to  go  her  own  way  in 
her  own  sphere.  In  reality  she  is  a  profoundly 
conceived  foil  to  the  other.  The  mother 
dominates  and  misguides  ;  the  devoted  wife, 
the  "  gracious  silence,"  lovingly  complies  and 
cannot  save.  Tragedy  has  here  become  some- 
thing deeper  than  a  series  of  tragic  events  : 
it  is  a  whole  aspect  of  life. 


190      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

It  was  probably  a  circumstantial  accident 
that  gave  us,  in  addition  to  those  incompar- 
able portraits  of  women,  yet  a  third,  that  of 
Valeria,  who,  though  she  briefly  figures  in 
Plutarch,  has  strictly  nothing  to  do  with  the 
action  of  the  play  save  to  suggest  anew,  by 
her  account  of  the  boy  Marcius,  how  even 
admirable  women  may  miseducate  children. 
(Shakespeare  is  careful  to  insist  on  her 
nobility  and  charm  by  putting  a  warm 
eulogium  of  her  in  the  mouth  of  Coriolanus  ; 
but  he  had  before  introduced  her  as  enjoying 
the  episode  of  the  child  rending  a  butterfly 
in  pieces.  The  detail  may  have  been  sug- 
gested to  him  by  Montaigne,  who  makes 
earnest  comment  upon  matters  of  the  kind  in 
regard  to  education. )  As  all  female  parts  were 
then  played  by  boys,  and  there  are  three 
women  characters  on  the  stage  at  once,  alike 
in  Lear^  in  Coriolanus,  and  in  Antony  and 
Cleopatra,  we  know  that  the  company  then 
had  three  boys  available,  and  that  Valeria 
was  thus  made  a  possible  character  in  the 
Roman  play.  But  the  man  who  drew  her  and 
Volumnia  and  Virgilia  was  beyond  question 
deeply  interested  in  women  as  personalities. 

Antony  is  probably  a  little  later  than 
Coriolanus  ;  and  it  completes  the  testimony 
to  its  author's  creative  mastery  at  the  mature 
height  of  his  power.  Here  again,  he  works 
directly  upon  the  narrative  of  Plutarch,  fol- 
lowing it  at  times  with  even  an  unnecessary 


SHAKESPEARE  191 

fidelity,  at  times  disregarding  it  pointedly, 
and  creating  or  developing  personalities  at 
will.  Here  we  can  follow  his  artistic  pro- 
cesses, and  the  lines  of  his  interests.  The 
Cleopatra  of  the  opening  scenes  is  wholly  of 
his  making,  and  is  sketched  in  deliberate  dis- 
regard of  some  later  accounts  by  Plutarch  of 
her  way  of  seeking  to  hold  Antony  :  while  the 
later  scene  of  her  fury  with  the  messenger 
who  tells  of  Antony's  marriage  is  wholly  in- 
vented, albeit  in  terms  of  the  idea  of  Cleopatra 
supplied  by  Plutarch  towards  the  close. 
Other  figures  who  are  little  more  than  names 
in  the  history  are  similarly  incarnated  :  the 
Iras  and  Charmian  of  the  second  scene  are  of 
the  dramatist's  shaping  and  colouring  ;  and 
the  keen  Enobarbus,  of  whom  Plutarch  tells 
almost  nothing  save  the  bare  episode  of  his 
desertion,  pardon,  and  death,  is  an  indepen- 
dent creation,  serving  as  a  foil,  a  commen- 
tator, and  a  companion  figure  to  Antony 
throughout.  Lepidus,  again,  who  is  but  a 
name  in  Plutarch,  is  dramatically  exhibited 
as  a  nullity  ;  while  the  drinking  scene  of  the 
triumvirs,  like  the  jesting-scene  of  the  maids, 
is  invented  to  meet  English  tastes.  Much  of 
the  action  did  not  admit  of  reproduction  ; 
and  its  variety  vetoed  any  such  unity  of 
structure  as  is  achieved  in  Coriolanus  ;  but 
the  ever-changing  scene  is  charged  with  an 
incomparable  wealth  of  life  ;  and  in  the  great 
central  figures  of  the  powerful  animal  man 


192      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

and  woman,  neither  good  nor  wholly  bad, 
yet  both  splendid  in  death,  we  have  present- 
ments of  humanity  as  vividly  interesting  as 
Hamlet's  self. 

Already  we  are  past  the  day  of  Elizabeth  ; 
and  in  his  closing  years,  writing  the  Winters 
Tale  and  Cymbeline^  with  their  developed  plot- 
interest,  we  seem  to  see  the  prematurely  aging 
playwright  rather  wistfully  taking  up  the 
plot-methods  of  the  younger  men,  yet  still 
with  an  art  transcending  theirs  as  much  in 
veracity  as  in  beauty,  even  when  he  subor- 
dinates truth  of  tragedy  to  the  popular  crav- 
ing for  a  "  happy  ending." 

The  Tempest  cannot  be,  as  men  would  fain 
have  it,  his  last  work.  Its  versification  is  not 
of  his  very  latest :  that  is  to  be  seen  in  his 
portions  of  Henry  VIII  (in  which  he  colla- 
borated with  Fletcher),  in  Cymbeline,  and  in 
the  Winter'' s  Tale,  In  the  Tempest  he  placed 
the  most  majestic  lines  he  ever  wrote  :  in  the 
later  plays  he  has  so  far  recoiled  from  the 
"  end-stopped "  verse  of  his  youth,  and  is 
so  unconcerned  about  smoothness  of  diction, 
that  he  becomes  frequently  obscure  by  excess 
of  concision,  and  makes  it  doubly  easy  for  us, 
in  the  Henry  VIII^  to  separate  his  close- 
wrought  and  vibrating  verse  from  the  many 
monotonous  sets  of  lines  ending  in  dissyllables, 
so  often  quoted  as  his  with  uncritical  praise. 
But  in  the  Winter's  Tale,  where  the  old  tragic 
power  is  allayed  by  an  indulgent  kindliness. 


SHAKESPEARE  193 

as  of  a  tired  old  man  entertaining  maidens, 
he  preserves  not  only  his  astonishing  veri- 
similitude of  impersonation,  but  his  power 
to  blend  words  with  a  beauty  which  seems 
to  transmute  them  into  music.  Cymbeline^  as 
a  whole,  tells  unmistakably  of  failing  powers  ; 
yet  is  the  figure  of  Imogen  beyond  the  reach 
of  any  other  poet  of  the  age.  In  no  serious 
play  of  his,  indeed,  is  the  note  of  greatness 
lacking.  When  Timon  and  Pericles  are  de- 
nuded of  their  alien  material,  as  has  been 
vigilantly  done  by  Mr.  Fleay,  they  stand 
almost  on  a  level  with  the  second-best  plays, 
so  fine  and  firm  is  the  workmanship.  Even  in 
the  Troilus  and  Cressida^  a  baffling  and  dis- 
concerting play  *  in  which  the  far-off  Homeric 
world  is  perversely  transposed  to  the  key  of 
Elizabethan  intrigue  and  envious  rivalry  and 
turbulent  self-seeking,  as  if  in  Aristophanic 
derision  of  Chapman's  hero-worship — even 
here,  where  again  other  men's  work  seems  to 
have  given  him  his  lead,  the  poet  bestows 
on  us  some  of  his  finest  didactic  verse,  clothed 
in  his  richest  diction ;  and  in  the  title- 
characters  he  triumphantly  reveals  his  un- 
matched power  alike  of  pitiless  and  pathetic 
portraiture. 

Still  on  the  seeds  of  all  he  made. 
The  rose  of  beauty  bums. 

*  It  is  now  certain  that  this  play  was  not  new 
when  published  in  1609.  It  was  probably  written 
or  adapted  about  1599. 

13 


194      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Our  praise,  indeed,  applies  mainly  to  his 
dramas.  It  is  one  of  the  puzzles  of  literature 
that  this  master  of  great  rhythm  and  intensely 
concentrated  dramatic  utterance  should  have 
first  sought  and  won  fame  by  the  publication 
of  two  long  rhymed  poems  which  even  in  that 
age  of  diffuse  poetry  are  notable  no  less  for 
their  prolixity  than  for  their  sheer  smooth 
fluency.  Had  he  left  nothing  but  the  Venus 
and  the  Lucrece,  we  could  not  really  have 
known  that  he  possessed  genius,  so  wanting 
are  they  in  nearly  all  that  makes  his  plays 
immortal.  He  would  seem  indeed  to  have 
written  them  by  way  of  earning  something 
in  a  year  in  which  the  plague,  closing  the 
theatres,  suspended  his  ordinary  means  of 
living.  So  produced,  they  yet  won  him 
instant  fame  in  his  day,  so  easily  did  he  frame 
what  his  public  cared  for.  The  far  more 
memorable  Sonnets,  in  nearly  all  of  which  he 
so  easily  excels  most  of  the  contemporary 
practitioners  of  that  form,  and  rivals  the  best, 
were  clearly  not  meant  for  publication,  though 
the  problem  of  their  origin  remains  unsolved 
save  by  conflicting  hypotheses  ;  and  for  the 
rest  we  have  but  a  few  doubtful  poems  from 
him,  published  with  some  certainly  not  his, 
to  reveal  his  lyric  faculty,  apart  from  the  songs 
scattered  through  the  plays.  These,  so  ex- 
quisite at  their  best,  he  seems  to  have  penned 
simply  for  their  stage  purpose.  The  ethereal 
lines : 


SHAKESPEARE  195 

Nothing  of  him  that  doth  fade  ^ 

But  doth  suffer  a  sea  change 
Into  something  rich  and  strange, 

and  the  "Take,  oh  take  those  Hps  away,"  were 
for  this  magician  things  by  the  way,  fortuities 
of  his  main  tasks.  There  is  something  stag- 
gering in  the  reflection  that  those  tasks  them- 
selves were  the  outcome  rather  of  the  need  to 
Hve  than  of  the  need  to  sing. 

This  is  the  explanation  of  much  of  the  com- 
parative triviality  of  some  of  his  early  work.         j 
The    doctrine    (fulminated    by    Jonson    and     \l 
Chapman  and  held  by  Bacon)  that  the  drama     y\ 
was  properly  a   means  of  edification,  never    / 
troubled  Shakespeare.     He  had  not  sought  / 
the  theatre  with  missionary  motives.     From 
the  first,  his  instinctive  judgment  withheld 
him  from  the  graver  stage  sins  against  good 
feeling  ;    but  for  the  rest  he  was  minded  to 
move  and  entertain  by  his  art,  not  to  edify 
by  his  explicit  teaching,  apart  from  the  spon- 
taneous moralizings  which  fitted  his  person- 
ages to  their  situations.  And  so  he  makes  his 
clowns  pun  for  punning's  sake,  and  splash 
in  ribaldry  for  gross  mirth's  sake,   because 
that  was  the  popular  taste  of  the  time  ;   and 
provides  farcial  relief  to  comedy,  comic  relief  . 
to  tragedy,  because  the  audiences  so  willed  it.   < 
It  was  only  at  the  height  of  his  power  that, 
in  a  much  deepened  mood,  his  sheer  genius 
for  verisimilitude,  his  spontaneous  concern  to 
hold  a  mirror  up  to  nature,  moved  him  to 


196      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

turn  the  very  Fool  into  a  new  recruit  of 
tragedy,  and  to  transcend  at  length  even  the 
chosen  plane  of  poetic  diction,  on  which  he 
distanced  all  rivalry,  with  Lear's  "  Prithee, 
undo  this  button."  Pressures  of  fortune,  as 
it  happens  now  and  then,  had  sent  to  his 
true  task  a  genius  who  was  to  be  made  one 
of  the  great  artists  of  all  time. 

We  have  the  more  occasion  to  be  thankful 
for  the  chance.  Save  for  his  manifold  handi- 
work, ranging  from  the  most  joyous  mirth 
to  the  darkest  tragedy,  we  should  never  have 
known  the  possibilities  of  English  poetic 
drama.  Without  him,  we  feel,  the  loud  wild 
world  of  the  Elizabethan  stage  would  have 
lacked  the  most  precious  of  its  lights,  its 
clearest  sunshine  and  the  starry  sanity  with 
which  he  enspheres  its  tragic  night.  None 
of  them  all  could  vie  with  him  in  the  realiza- 
tion of  the  immanence  of  evil  in  life  :  their 
darkest  pictures  suggest  rather  a  violent 
extraction  of  horrors  for  horror's  sake,  where 
in  his  hands  goodness  and  sin  alike  seem  part 
of  the  natural  process  of  things.  Yet  no  less 
had  he  excelled  in  his  early  power  of  steep- 
ing life  in  radiance  :  the  faculty  which  could 
carry  romantic  comedy  to  the  height  of  happi- 
ness was  that  which,Jtu]?ning  aw^y^ironx-pyy^ 
carried  tragedy  to  .Ihg^^s^ierge-  o£.  emotional 
endurance,  and  yet  again,  in  the  last^^hase  of 
it&.creatiLy£L.powp.r,  .gave~us  botli  the  light  and. 
the  shadowJnJtheLhalajice.x^ 


SHAKESPEARE  197 

"V^hich  seesalL^JSojQ^^ 

ture,  has  exhibited  this  catholicity  „QL.syin- 
pathy.  Over  and  above  all,  he  is  the  supreme 
master  of  blank-verse  rhythm,  so  possessing 
it  that  hundreds  of  his  lines,  after  the  hun- 
dredth reading,  yield  us  an  "  unspent  be^Jity 
ofLsurpriseJ'  But  for  him,  we  should  not 
have  known  what  the  chance-made  instrument 
could  achieve.  And  still  he  is  but  the  greatest 
master  in  a  unique  school,  growing  from  it 
and  relating  to  it  in  his  faults  even  as  in  his 
excellences. 

His  superiority  alike  to  his  contemporaries 
and  his  successors,  which  is  apt  to  be  made  a 
theme  of  rather  barren  wonderment,  should 
hint  to  us  that  the  full  force  of  the  contrast 
depends  partly  on  the  special  circumstances. 
Merely  to  say  that  never  since  has  such  genius 
existed  is  at  once  to  go  beyond  our  real  warrant 
and  to  miss  recognition  of  some  of  the  most 
relevant  facts.  It  is  quite  true  that  no  such 
combination  of  poetic  and  dramatic  power 
as  Shakespeare's  has  ever  recurred  in  the 
drama  ;  but  it  does  not  follow  that  such  genius 
has  never  since  potentially  existed.  It  is 
important  to  realize  that  even  a  second 
Shakespeare  in  almost  any  subsequent  period, 
certainly  in  our  own  day,  would  be  debarred 
from  bestowing  on  his  work  such  literary 
splendour  as  blazes  from  the  great  tragedies 
of  the  great  master.  Not  only  is  the  great 
poetry  often  dramatically  supererogatory  even 


198      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

when  the  poetic  form  is  taken  for  granted — 
so  much  can  be  estabUshed  by  comparing 
highly  poetic  scenes  with  others  where  fine 
poetry  was  equally  admissible,  but  is  iiot  forth- 
coming— the  very  conduct  of  the  play  at 
times  transcends  the  plane  of  drama  proper. 
Charles  Lamb  was  quite  right  in  saying  that 
Lear  transcends  the  stage.  To  say  nothing  of 
the  idealization  of  evil  qua  evil  in  the  terrific 
personalities  of  Regan,  Goneril,  and  Edmund, 
the  tremendous  scene  of  Lear's  madness  in 
the  storm  is  capable  only  of  a  mental  realiza- 
tion. To  reply  that  so  great  a  master  of 
stagecraft  as  Shakespeare  would  never  have 
put  upon  the  stage  more  than  it  could  carry 
is  not  merely  to  beg  the  question,  but  to  ignore 
the  instances  in  which  he  himself  can  be  seen 
to  have  retrenched  parts  of  his  work  as  being 
perceptibly  out  of  the  dramatic  orbit.  Lear 
was  not  written  in  a  mood  of  cool  aesthetic 
calculation  ;  and  in  point  of  fact  the  back- 
grounding of  the  tempest  of  Lear's  soul  with 
a  tempest  in  nature  is  a  psychological  master- 
stroke which  defies  concrete  representation. 
Either  the  physical  storm  or  the  actor  must 
give  way,  for  physical  reasons.  So  great  an 
actor  as  Salvini,  superbly  fitted  in  voice  and 
person  as  in  power  of  passion  to  carry  off  the 
scene,  failed  at  this  point  to  attain  the  imagin- 
able effect :  actor  and  audience  alike  felt  the 
physical  overstrain  set  up  by  the  unearthly 
climax. 


SHAKESPEARE  199 

But  this  very  scene  is  for  the  reader  one  of 
the  crowning  manifestations  of  Shakespeare's 
power ;  and  its  production  was  made  possible 
only  by  the  general  openness  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan stage  to  all  manner  of  experiment,  and 
by  Shakespeare's  own  position  of  authority 
in  his  company.  Modern  drama,  in  com- 
mercial theatres,  is  conditioned  by  the  need 
for  long  "  runs  "  to  cover  large  expenses  : 
Shakespeare  was  free,  within  the  limits  of 
his  own  discretion,  to  load  a  play  with  purely 
literary  value  to  an  extent  which  modern 
managers  could  not  permit.  Above  all,  he 
had   the  stimulus   of  ,4j3^ie-4tee^^^.  j^  form, 

which  not  only  allowed  but  dem^nclcid  beauty 
and_force  of  diction  for  diction's  sake.  And 
this  gives  us  one  of  our  clues  to  his  work  in 
some  doubtful  cases.  It  would  be  strange 
if  any  lesser  man  could  have  so  copied  his 
voice  as  to  give  us  those  "  Shakespearean  " 
passages  in  The  Two  Noble  Kinsmen  and  Sir 
Thomas  More  which  so  many  critics  have  felt 
to  be  his.  But  sometimes  there  is  no  room 
for  doubt.  In  Pericles^  so  much  of  which 
as  it  stands  is  impossibly  bad  for  him, 
there  are  expressions  which  we  know  could 
only  be  his.  A  great  living  master,  the 
author  of  Typhoon^  has  in  that  story  em- 
ployed pages  of  admirable  description  to 
express  the  sheer  immensity  of  the  uproar 
of  a  hurricane,  in  which  a  cry  shouted  in 
a   comrade's  ear    is   as  a  remote  murmur. 


200      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

In  Pericles  the  idea  is  put  in  a  line  and  a 
half: 

Tho  seaman's  whistle 
Is  as  a  whisper  in  the  ear  of  dpath, 

This  is  the  lion's  claw :  no  other  man  could  so 
strike  with  words  ;  and  effects  such  as  these, 
impossible  in  our  modern  realistic  drama,  but 
main  items  in  our  conception  of  Shakespeare, 
are  specialities  of  the  art  form  in  which  he  is 
the  supreme  executant. 


CHAPTER  IX 

PROSE   FICTION 

It  is  a  somewhat  puzzling  fact  that  the  kind 
of  literature  which  seems  to  us  most  naturally- 
popular  should  have  made  comparatively 
small  progress,  either  as  to  quantity  or  as  to 
quality,  in  a  period  in  which  we  have  seen 
poetry  and  prose,  and  above  all,  poetic  drama, 
so  rapidly  developing  in  power  and  vogue. 
In  our  own  day,  prose  fiction  has  many  times 
more  readers  than  either  poetry  or  history. 
In  the  England  of  Elizabeth  there  was  but 
little  prose  fiction  to  read,  and  that  little  was 
not  to  be  compared  with  the  current  drama 
either  in  psychological  or  in  narrative  interest. 
But  the  special  problem  merges  in  a  larger 
one.     Prose  fiction  was  a  late  development 


PROSE  FICTION  201 

in  ancient  as  in  modern  literature  ;  and  its 
advance  was  slow  for  more  than  a  century 
after  the  death  of  Elizabeth.  In  an  age 
abounding  in  action  and  adventure,  the  novel 
of  action  and  adventure  was  little  attempted ; 
and  in  an  age  much  given  to  dramatic 
psychology  the  psychological  novel  hardly 
emerges.  Not  till  the  eighteenth  century 
were  the  English  to  have  Robinson  Crusoe^ 
The  Vicar  of  Wakefield,  and  Clarissa :  and 
not  till  the  nineteenth  were  the  French  to 
have  Dumas  or  Balzac.  It  is  clear  that  either 
psychological  or  economic  influences  stood  in 
the  way  of,  or  were  lacking  to  promote,  the 
systematic  development  of  the  prose  tale  or 
romance. 

In  the  early  Tudor  days,  men  read  the 
Morte  d^ Arthur,  Huon  of  Bordeaux,  and  Guy 
of  Warwick  very  much  as  they  read  chronicles 
or  the  Lyf  of  Charles  the  Grete,  though  from 
Caxton  onwards  there  were  many  avowals  of 
the  dubiety  of  such  quasi-histories.  These 
early  French  romances  have  indeed  a  charm 
of  concreteness  and  of  artless  movement  to 
which  we  can  still  turn  with  zest ;  but  the 
real  novelist  for  that  age,  alike  for  character- 
drawing  and  for  narrative,  would  seem  to 
have  been  Chaucer,  who  had  freely  drawn 
upon  and  transcended  the  tale-tellers  of 
Southern  Europe.  At  a  time  when  Chaucer's 
metre  was  no  longer  understood,  it  would 
seem  a  simple  thing  for  a  prose-writer  to  have 


202      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

sought  after  Chaucerian  narrative  effects  in 
a  medium  which  reUeved  him  of  the  burdens  of 
rhyme  and  metre,  especially  when  there  were 
current  translations  from  Boccaccio  to  point 
the  way.  But  though  the  translations  multi- 
plied, the  response  in  native  invention  re- 
mained slight  and  unsatisfactory. 

A  large  part  of  the  explanation  lies  in  the 
simple  economic  circumstances.  In  Shake- 
ijpeare's  day  only  a  minority  of  men,  and  only 
a  small  number  of  women,  could  read  ;  while 
the  drama  had  an  economic  basis  alike  in  the 
reading  class  and  in  the  large  class  of  illiterates, 
for  whom  the  drama  was  a  gateway  to  a  sem- 
blance of  historical  and  other  knowledge  as 
well  as  to  entertainment.  There  was  thus 
a  constant  demand  for  new  plays  ;  and  the 
playwrights,  if  ill-paid,  were  at  least  always 
being  tempted  to  produce ;  while  no  man 
could  hope  by  writing  tales  to  make  a  living 
— the  chief  motive  to  novel-writing  in  later 
periods.  But  the  psychic  circumstances  were 
also  unfavourable  to  rapid  development  in 
fiction.  Drama  was  bound  in  its  own  nature 
to  attain  to  something  of  method,  order,  and 
brevity  if  it  was  to  live.  The  French  cycles 
which  took  eight  days  to  play  were  out  of 
the  question  for  the  London  theatres ;  and 
the  "two  hours'  traffic  of  our  stage"  meant 
an  ordered  plot,  in  which  things  happened 
consecutively  and  significantly,  making  a 
coherent  and  intelligible  whole.     Character- 


PROSE   FICTION  203 

painting  was  part  of  the  economy  of  the  pro- 
cess ;  and  the  actor's  art  made  a  constant 
appeal  for  its  development,  and  for  the 
subordination  to  it  of  the  discursive  poetry 
which  was  the  main  obstacle  to  dramatic 
realism*  But  the  tale-teller  who  could  not 
invent  new  and  good  plots,  and  who  relied  on 
a  string  of  episodes  and  conversations,  lay 
under  no  saving  check  from  circumstance, 
and  was  inevitably  unprepared  to  make  the 
brooding  study  of  life  which  alone  can  yield 
great  work  in  fiction  form.  Thus  the  prose 
tale,  taken  over  by  English  literature  from 
the  large  stores  of  Italy  and  France,  led  to 
no  such  native  growth  as  took  place  in  drama. 
Some  development  there  was,  but  it  was 
mainly  unfortunate  and  impermanent. 

Shortly  before  Elizabeth's  accession  there 
was  produced  The  Hundred  Merry  Tales 
(1557)  a  translation  of  Les  Cent  Nouvelles 
Nouvelles,  the  long  popularity  of  which  is 
attested  by  Beatrice  in  Much  Ado  about 
Nothing  ;  and  about  ten  years  later  there 
appeared  the  collection  known  as  Painter's 
Palace  of  Pleasure  (1566-7),  wherein  are 
translated  a  hundred  and  one  tales,  some 
thirty-six  from  the  classics  ;  some  forty  from 
the  Italian  of  Boccaccio  and  Bandello,  mainly 
by  way  of  the  French  of  Belleforest ;  and 
the  rest  chiefly  from  Queen  Margaret's  Hep- 
tameron.  Between  Painter's  start  and  the 
year  1583,  there  appeared  seven  other  similar 


204      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

collections,  some  of  which  ran  into  several 
editions,  being  helped  thereto  by  Ascham's 
vigorous  vilification  of  the  species  ;  but  the 
Palace  of  Pleasure  is  by  far  the  largest,  and  is 
in  every  way  the  most  important. 

Painter's  compilation,  which  by  its  proffer 
of  plots  deeply  and  decisively  influenced  the 
Elizabethan  drama,  contains  much  that  is  at 
a  higher  level  of  moral  and  literary  effort 
than  the  generally  improper  Merry  Tales  of 
France,  including  as  it  does  not  only  Da 
Porto's  immortal  tale  of  Romeo  and  Juliet 
(recast  and  not  improved  by  Bandello),  but 
a  number  in  which  the  characters  of  the 
personages  form  the  pivot  of  the  story.  These 
character-studies  are  indeed  rather  crude  in 
their  kind,  running  to  extreme  cases  of  self- 
will  and  self-abnegation  ;  but  to  the  novel 
of  character,  of  which  they  are  among  the 
first  essays,  they  distinctly  belong.  Yet,  be- 
longing though  they  mostly  do  to  the  four- 
teenth and  fifteenth  centuries,  they  remain 
above  the  plane  of  the  English  prose  fiction 
of  the  Elizabethan  age.  Boccaccio's  De- 
cameron represented  the  fruitage  of  whole 
centuries  of  the  multiplex  civilization  of  the 
Italian  republics,  with  a  further  culling  from 
that  of  Byzantium,  purveyed  by  exiles  from 
Constantinople,  and  large  draughts  from  the 
old  fabliaux  of  France,  in  which  Boccaccio 
was  only  too  well  grounded  through  his  early 
sojourn  in  Paris.     Chaucer  in  the  fourteenth 


PROSE   FICTION  205 

century  was  quite  abreast  of  the  psychology 
of  Boccaccio's  narrative  poems  ;  and  he  told 
in  Troilus  and  Criseyde  the  story  of  a  great 
passion  more  subtly  and  tenderly  than  it  is 
told  in  Boccaccio's  poem  on  the  same  theme, 
Filostrato,  or  even  in  his  powerful  prose 
romance  of  Fiammetta  ;  but  upon  Chaucer's 
age  there  had  followed  a  century  of  storm 
and  strife,  in  which  English  literature  had 
stagnated  and  eddied  like  a  stopped  stream. 
Poetry  recovered  and  drama  leaped  up  under 
Elizabeth,  but  not  so  the  art  of  narrative 
fiction. 

Italian  influence  is  ostensibly  present  in  the 
first  native  novel  of  the  age,  George  Gas- 
coigne's  The  Adventures  of  Master  F.  J.,  later 
entitled  The  Pleasant  Fable  of  Ferdinando 
Jeronimi  and  Leonora  de  Velasco^  translated 
out  of  the  Italian  Tales  of  Bartello,  written 
about  1571,  and  first  published  in  1573. 
Apropos  of  its  title,  it  has  to  be  said  that  it 
is  not  pleasant,  it  is  not  a  fable,  and  it  is  not 
translated  from  the  Italian,  Bartello  being  a 
myth.  But  it  is  a  notable  performance.  It 
is  remarked  concerning  Gascoigue,  whom  we 
have  already  met  with  as  an  early  poet,  that 
he  wrote  "  the  first  prose  tale  of  modern  life, 
the  first  prose  comedy,  the  first  tragedy  trans- 
lated from  the  Italian,  the  first  maske,  the 
first  regular  satire,  the  first  treatise  on  poetry 
in  English."  All  this  is  in  itself  remarkable  : 
and    while    the    other    ''  firsts "    are    chiefly 


206      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

memorable  as  being  such,  the  Adventures  of 
F.  J.  in  its  sinister  fashion  has  a  somewhat 
arresting  quaUty.  It  is  a  corrupt  and  withal 
a  confused  narrative,  strongly  suggesting  a 
garbled  version  of  an  actual  intrigue  in  Eng- 
land ;  but  it  is  written  simply,  sanely,  and 
swiftly,  with  a  directness  of  aim  in  striking 
contrast  with  the  discursive  ways  of  Lilly  and 
Greene.  It  was  in  Gascoigne  to  have  become 
an  artist  had  he  been  less  of  a  knave,  and  had 
his  fortunes  left  him  less  free  to  be  a^dilettante. 
His  women  have  a  touch  of  actuality  which 
in  those  of  Greene  and  Lilly,  if  ever  per- 
ceptible, is  lost  in  the  rattle  of  their  euphuistic 
rhetoric. 

Lilly's  two  Euphues  books  (1579-80), 
loaded  as  they  are  with  disquisition,  have  to 
be  estimated  as  novels  ;  and  in  that  aspect 
they  are  most  charitably  to  be  recognized  as 
the  work  of  a  young  man  of  five-and-twenty, 
inevitably  handicapped  by  his  lack  of  deep 
experience.  Over  every  page  is  the  trail  of 
the  "  clever-young-mannishness "  that  has 
been  complained  of  in  the  early  comedies  of 
Shakespeare.  The  main  plot  of  the  first  re- 
solves itself  into  the  tale  of  the  winning  away 
of  Lucilla,  the  fiancee  of  Philautus,  by  his 
friend  Euphues,  who  in  turn  is  jilted  by 
Lucilla  for  a  third  suitor.  The  lady,  if  ever 
seen  in  life,  is  not  made  intelligible  in  the 
story,  being  a  mere  violently-pulled  puppet 
whose  figure  death  itself  cannot  make  tragic  ; 


PROSE   FICTION  207 

and  the  men,  who  quarrel  coarsely,  are  no 
more  attractive  or  interesting  than  she  is. 
There  is  thus  nothing  to  redeem  the  insupport- 
able hail  of  artificial  simile,  antithesis,  allitera- 
tion, and  classical  allusion,  which  pelts  on  till 
the  maddened  reader  is  fain  to  cry  with  mine 
host  in  Chaucer,  "  No  more  of  this ! "  To  find 
any  enduring  interest  in  the  book,  we  must 
fasten  on  the  included  treatises,  of  which 
that  dealing  with  education  is  substantially 
copied  from  Plutarch,  but  which  among  them 
give  some  notion  of  the  culture-life  of  Eliza- 
bethan England. 

The  second  book,  Euphues  and  his  England, 
is  dedicated  to  "the  ladies  and  gentel women 
of  England  "  as  well  as  to  the  "  gentelmen 
readers  "  appealed  to  in  the  1581  edition  of 
the  first.  The  ladies  had  indeed  small  cause 
to  be  delighted  with  that ;  but  in  the  second 
they  are  more  agreeably  dealt  with.  Still 
there  is  no  valid  characterization  :  the  women 
characters  are  described,  never  presented ; 
and  their  harangues  are  as  tediously  didactic, 
as  impossibly  artificial,  if  not  so  monstrously 
protracted  as  those  of  the  men.  The  story, 
if  it  can  be  so  called,  is  in  fact  little  more 
than  a  series  of  harangues,  varied  by  didactic 
or  disputatious  epistles  and  by  narratives  in 
which  A  tells  the  instructive  tale  of  B,  who 
is  almost  immediately  made  to  begin  an 
edifying  tale  of  C.  There  is  no  advance  in 
fictive  art  on  the  Anatomy  of  Wit ;    the  herbs 


208      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

and  birds  and  stones  pullulate  as  before ;  and 
as  in  the  Anatomy  we  end  by  fastening  on  the 
included  treatises,  so  in  Euphues  and  his  Eng- 
land we  are  fain  to  find  our  interest  in  the 
final  Euphues^  Glass  for  Europe,  in  which 
description  of  England  and  her  inhabitants 
lapses  into  harangue,  like  everything  else  in 
the  volume.  Euphues,  in  short,  was  but  a 
nine  years'  wonder  for  an  immature  world ; 
incapable  of  constituting  a  good  school  either 
of  style  or  of  fiction,  though  the  editions 
went  on  at  intervals  down  to  1636.  It  had 
pains  and  cleverness  enough  spent  on  it  to 
make  a  great  book  ;  but  for  lack  of  real 
genius  and  human  insight  it  remains  but  a 
monument  of  wrong  artr  tolerable  only  on  the 
score  that  the  art  of  the  rest  of  the  world  in 
that  field  was  mostly  no  better. 

Infelicitous  as  was  the  experiment  of  Lilly 
(who  never  tried  again  in  fiction),  the  no  less 
famous  attempt  of  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  The 
Countess  of  Pembroke's  Arcadia,  was  hardly 
more  durable.  When  posthumously  pub- 
lished in  1590  it  took  the  wind  out  of  the  sails 
of  Euphues,  and  it  kept  its  vogue  longer,  in 
virtue  of  being  less  irksome  in  style  and 
more  various  in  its  attempts  at  human  in- 
terest. But  Sidney,  scribbling  his  romantic 
medley  for  the  entertainment  of  his  sister  at 
the  age  of  twenty-five  or  twenty-six,  made 
like  Lilly  (though  certainly  riper  than  he) 
the  mistake  of  dabbling  in  fiction  before  he 


PROSE   FICTION  209 

had  adequately  studied  life  and  character ; 
and,  like  him,  employed  stiff  artistic  con- 
ventions for  the  presentment  of  an  infinitely 
difficult  and  delicate  subject-matter.  It  is 
always  to  be  remembered,  indeed,  that  he 
had  no  design  of  publication,  and  actually  ex- 
pressed the  wish  that  his  manuscript  should 
be  destroyed.  The  intellectual  modesty 
which  graces  the  critical  confidence  of  the 
Apology  for  Poetry  was  indeed  such  as 
could  reveal  to  him  that  great  books  are  not 
to  be  produced  as  pastimes.  But  for  that 
age  the  Arcadia  was  even  more  of  an  event 
than  the  Euphues  ;  and  the  beloved  memory 
of  Sidney  escaped  the  rebound  of  alert  criti- 
cism which  soon  fell  upon  the  fame  of  Lilly. 
As  we  have  noted,  Sidney's  Arcadia  is 
primarily  inspired  by  the  old  romance  of 
Heliodorus,  then  coming  into  European  know- 
ledge. For  the  rest,  it  looks  to  previous 
continental  "  pastorals  "  and  to  the  romances 
of  chivalry  ;  never  attaining  to  any  new  and 
vital  conception  of  the  art  of  narrative  in- 
vention. Behind  the  pseudo-classic  names 
which  help  to  keep  the  story  out  of  any  his- 
torical frame  there  is  indeed  some  play  of 
the  actual  human  passions  which  filled  the 
stage  of  life  in  England  as  abundantly  as 
elsewhere ;  and  there  is  often  a  certain 
vivacity  in  the  narrative  of  the  emotional 
passages  which  arouses  in  a  modern  reader 
the    hope    of   hearing    the    right    word,    the 

14 


210      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

genuine  utterance  of  human  feeling.  But  the 
hope  is  always  deferred  by  the  fluent  prolixity 
of  the  narrative,  and  the  fatal  facility  with 
which  all  the  characters  alike  turn  feeling 
into  declamation.  Had  Sidney  lived  to  wit- 
ness the  great  drama  that  grew  out  of  the 
rude  beginnings  which  repelled  him,  he  would 
haply  have  realized  the  might  of  simplicity 
and  naturalness  :  as  it  is,  his  traditions  keep 
him  much  less  realistic,  much  more  essentially 
rhetorical  in  prose  dialogue  than  are  the 
later  dramatists  in  their  blank  verse. 

As  to  episode,  he  is  far  behind  Heliodorus, 
who,  doubtless  proceeding  upon  a  previous 
evolution  of  narrative  technique,  skilfully 
keeps  up  a  continuous  thread  of  interest 
through  an  abundance  of  relevant  and  excit- 
ing incident.  In  short,  the  Arcadia  is  to  be 
read  not  for  its  interest  as  a  novel,  but  for 
the  historic  and  literary  interest  it  sets  up 
as  a  vigorous  experiment  by  a  powerful  mind, 
at  once  literary  and  trained  to  action,  in  an 
unfortunate  and  impermanent  art-form.  It 
is  much  more  readable  than  the  Euphues 
books.  Sidney,  indeed,  was  infected  with  the 
mannerism  of  verbal  and  phrasal  antithesis 
which  in  Lilly  was  a  mania ;  and  he  never 
in  this  book  attains  save  momentarily  to  the 
balance  of  style  which  the  sincerity  of  his 
purpose  and  his  purport  enabled  him  to 
compass  in  the  Apology.  But  he  does  not 
progress  constantly  upon  antithesis  as  upon 


PROSE   FICTION  211 

wooden  stilts,  in  the  manner  of  Lilly :  the 
sentence  can  take  other  forms  and  vary  its 
cadence,  especially  when  the  reflection  is 
worth  it ;  and  often  it  has  enough  of  artificial 
grace,  and  even  of  true  feeling,  to  explain  to 
us  the  warmth  of  its  acceptance  in  its  genera- 
tion. Sidney  had,  in  fact,  an  element  of  the 
higher  genius  that  the  glittering  Lilly  lacked. 
They  are  akin  chiefly  in  their  supererogation 
of  words,  their  overdrafts  upon  utterance  in 
proportion  to  their  matter,  and  their  conse- 
quent infliction  of  a  burden  of  unnatural 
loquacity  upon  their  personages.  Et  in  Ar- 
cadia ego,  Lilly  might  have  said ;  though 
Sidney  is  the  finer  writer  as  well  as  the 
greater  man  of  the  two. 

It  is  no  contradiction  of  the  denial  of 
fruitfulness  in  the  case  of  Lilly  to  say  that 
two  other  Elizabethan  story-tellers,  one  of 
them  still  readable  with  pleasure,  the  other 
much  read  in  his  day,  enrolled  themselves 
under  his  banner.  Thomas  Lodge's  Rosa- 
lynde  (1590)  actually  had  for  sub-title 
Euphues^  Golden  Legacy  .  .  .  bequeathed  to 
Philautus^  Sons;  and  Robert  Greene  cer- 
tainly aped  and  parroted  Lilly  through  a 
dozen  prose  tales.  But  Lodge  in  Rosalynde 
merely  employed  Lilly's  mannerisms  in  a 
new  kind  of  story-telling  ;  whereas  in  Greene 
there  is  no  abiding  element  apart  from  the 
sombre  interest  of  his  tales  of  rascality  from 
the  underworld  in  which  he  dived  so  deeply. 


212      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

Even  as  to  that,  indeed,  he  is  indebted  to 
eariier  writers  on  similar  topics.  Lodge  re- 
veals himself  as  the  one  of  the  three  who 
could  really  conceive  an  interesting  plot, 
with  interesting  characters,  and  keep  the 
story  and  the  personages  going  without  get- 
ting bogged  in  rhetoric  and  irrelevance.  In 
that  age  of  versatilities,  when  so  many  men 
not  only  alternated  freely  between  writing 
and  action,  but  freely  tried  so  many  forms  of 
writing.  Lodge  stands  out  notably,  having 
jRgured  as  dramatist,  narrative  poet,  briefless 
barrister,  pamphleteer,  story-teller,  sonnet- 
eer, satirist,  translator,  and  soldier-sailor 
before  settling  down  as  translator  and  phy- 
sician. As  adaptable  as  Gascoigne,  he  had 
more  mental  force,  and  his  tale  of  Rosalynde 
proves  him  to  have  had  a  better  heart.  His 
first  attempt  at  fiction,  The  Delectable  History 
of  Forhonius  and  Prisceria  (1584),  is  indeed 
an  unimpressive  performance,  in  which  the 
slightest  of  plots  is  made  a  peg  for  a  series 
of  declamations  and  poems.  The  hero  and 
heroine  are  thwarted  in  the  immemorial  way 
by  the  lady's  stern  father  ;  she  being  sent  to 
be  immured  in  his  country  castle,  where  the 
hero,  of  course,  finds  access  to  her  in  dis- 
guise. He  there  recites  for  her  entertain- 
ment and  the  advancement  of  his  own  suit 
a  mass  of  verse ;  till  the  father  again  super- 
venes with  a  furious  veto,  which  is  speedily 
withdrawn,    and  the   pair  live  happy    ever 


PROSE   FICTION  213 

after,  like  any  other  "  walking "  lady  and 
gentleman. 

Rosalynde  is  a  much  more  original  and  a 
much  more  interesting  tale.  It  is  indeed 
by  a  long  way  the  best  of  his  handful  of 
tales,  which  mostly  suggest  mere  imitation  of 
models  in  Greene's  gallery.  Founded  on  the 
old  ballad-tale  of  Gamelyn,  driven  to  out- 
lawry by  his  bad  brother,  it  develops  the 
whole  main-plot  of  As  You  Like  It,  Shake- 
speare having  added  only  the  humorous 
under-plot  of  Touchstone  and  Audrey,  and 
the  character  of  Jaques,  with,  of  course,  that 
whole  blessed  atmosphere  of  humour  which 
no  other  romanticist  of  the  day  could  create, 
though  Lodge's  fiction  is  not  so  destitute  in 
that  regard  as  that  of  Lilly  and  Sidney  and 
Greene. 

The  weakness  of  Rosalynde  is  just  in  the 
euphuistic  machinery  of  mechanical  anti- 
thesis in  phrase,  modish  multiplication  of 
simile,  saw^  and  metaphor,  and  the  constant 
substitution  of  harangue  and  apostrophe  for 
true  dialogue — all  combining  to  create  an 
effect  of  restless  garrulity  and  thoughtless 
bustle.  There  is  no  sense  of  critical  or 
artistic  control,  and  sheer  fear  of  being  dull 
often  brings  out  tedium.  As  regards  the 
device  of  inserted  poetry.  Lodge  succeeds 
rather  better  than  Sidney,  who  so  frequently 
drops  into  poetry  in  the  Arcadia  without 
making  us  sorry  to  go  back  to  prose.     Lodge's 


214      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

pieces  in  Rosalynde  have  a  reasonable  amount 
of  connexion  with  the  story;  and  though 
there  are  too  many  of  them,  the  madrigal 
"  Love  in  my  bosom  like  a  bee  "  would  make 
a  pleasant  interruption  anywhere.  They  all 
tell  of  that  over-exuberance,  that  boundless 
loquacity,  which  marks  most  Elizabethan 
prose  before  Bacon,  and  most  verse  before  the 
maturity  of  Shakespeare — a  surplusage  which 
seems  part  of  the  superabundance  of  vitality 
that  wells  up  everywhere  in  the  life  of  the 
epoch.  Too  often  does  the  Elizabethan  artist 
thus  "  die  in  his  own  too  much,"  losing  in- 
tensity in  what  the  age  called  "  copie."  If 
Lodge  had  been  less  responsive  to  leads,  less 
of  a  literary  copyist,  less  eager  to  echo  both 
Lilly  and  Greene,  he  might  have  left  a  deeper 
stamp  upon  Elizabethan  literature.  As  it  is, 
he  remains  one  of  its  noticeable  figures. 

The  puzzling  thing  about  his  fiction  is  that 
he  not  only  never  repeats  the  success  of 
Rosalynde  but  reverts  to  a  far  lower  level.  In 
1591  he  produced  an  elaborate  rewriting  of 
the  old  quasi-biography  of  Robert  Second^ 
Duke  of  Normandy,  otherwise  Robert  the 
Devil ;  and  thereafter,  in  1596,  a  thing  pro- 
fessedly taken  from  the  Spanish,  but  possibly 
all  his  own,  A  Margarite  of  America,  the 
most  senseless  literary  construction  of  the 
period.  The  case  of  the  wicked  Robert 
appears  to  have  suggested  to  him  the  idea  of 
a  story  of  another  wicked  prince ;    but  the 


PROSE  FICTION  215 

grim  old  tale  of  sin  and  repentance  had  taught 
him  nothing  of  the  arts  of  verisimilitude. 
The  novel  sets  out  with  an  account  of  the 
stopping  of  an  imminent  battle  between  two 
emperors  by  an  old  gentleman  of  philosophic 
habit,  who  steps  between  the  hosts  to  deliver 
an  essay  of  two  quarto  pages  in  condemnation 
of  war.  After  this  idyllic  start  there  comes 
a  delirious  succession  of  treacheries,  crimes, 
tortures,  and  other  atrocities,  variegated  by 
strokes  of  magic,  and  ending  in  a  general 
funeral.  The  whole  action  is  a  mere  night- 
mare. 

By  Lodge's  own  picturesque  account,  this 
egregious  narrative  was  penned  by  him,  as 
was  Rosalynde^  on  an  adventurous  voyage,  in 
the  Straits  of  Magellan,  "  in  which  place  to 
the  southward  many  wonderous  Isles,  many 
strange  fishes,  many  monstrous  Patagones, 
withdrew  my  senses  " — circumstances  which 
are  partly  explanatory.  "  The  time  I  wrote 
in,"  he  tells  again,  "  was  when  I  had  rather 
will  to  get  my  dinner  than  to  win  my  fame. 
The  order  I  wrote  in  was  past  order,  when  I 
rather  observed  men's  hands  lest  they  should 
strike  me,  than  curious  reason  of  men  to 
condemn  me.  In  a  word,  I  wrote  under  hope 
rather  the  fish  should  eat  both  me  writing 
and  my  paper  written,  than  fame  should  know 
me,  hope  should  acquaint  her  with  me,  or 
any  but  misery  should  hear  mine  ending." 
The  explanation,  in  brief,  is  that  in  1592  he 


216      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

was  "  at  sea  with  M.  Candish  (whose  memory, 
if  I  repent  not,  I  lament  not),"  and  had  a  very- 
bad  time  of  it.  Writing  his  mad  story  by 
way  of  a  distraction,  he  strung  it  with  a 
series  of  poems  and  euphuistic  dissertations, 
which  partly  did  duty  for  epistles  and  dia- 
logue, a  number  of  the  amorous  pieces  being 
hardily  presented  as  effusions  by  the  wicked 
prince  in  praise  of  the  last  lady  of  his  choice. 
The  whole  constitutes  a  singular  vision  of 
one  side  of  Elizabethan  life,  setting  up  a 
hearty  wish  that  the  irrepressible  belletrist 
had  given  us  an  account  of  his  actual  experi- 
ence under  "  M.  Candish  "  instead  of  a  tale 
in  the  manner  of  Euphues  and  the  narrative 
taste  of  Bedlam. 

Greene,  with  his  much  larger  output  in 
fiction,  did  nothing  so  attractive  as  Rosa- 
lynde,  but  nothing  so  extravagant  as  this  ; 
and  in  his  series  of  part-narrative  papers  on 
''  Cony-catching  "  and  his  Life  and  Death  of 
Ned  Browne,  he  attains  to  a  measure  of  realism 
which  Lodge  never  attempted.  Yet  Greene's 
Pandosto,  otherwise  Dorastus  and  Fawnia^ 
upon  which  Shakespeare  founded  the  Winters 
Tale,  is  finally  repulsive  in  a  way  only  possible 
to  Greene,  and  not  to  be  guessed  from  Shake- 
speare's transmutation.  The  bulk  of  Greene's 
prose  fiction,  in  short,  is  no  longer  readable, 
popular  as  it  was  for  a  whole  generation.  His 
romantic  tales,  written  in  Lilly's  style  after 
bad  Italian  models,  with  a  fluency  that  out- 


PROSE  FICTION  217; 

goes  even  the  Elizabethan  standard,  are 
strangely  wanting  in  the  note  of  reality 
which  he  was  able  several  times  to  sound  in 
his  plays.  This  indeed  is  in  keeping  with 
the  law  already  noted,  in  terms  of  which 
drama  soon  compels  or  invites  an  approach 
to  verisimilitude  that  is  not  accepted  by  fiction 
till  after  generations  of  slipshod  experiment. 
We  are  not  entitled  to  say  that  if  Shakespeare 
had  written  tales  he  would  so  far  have  trans- 
cended the  lax  technique  of  his  day  as  to 
.produce  something  commensurate  in  power 
with  his  dramas.  The  narrative  recitals  of 
his  characters  are  on  the  whole  the  least  con- 
vincing parts  of  his  plays  :  it  is  in  the  height 
of  psychic  action  that  he  becomes  the  un- 
matched master.  When  Macbeth  sees  the 
ghost  of  Banquo  he  gasps  a  question  which  is 
the  very  quintessence  of  dramatic  perception, 
setting  our  nerves  tingling  or  shuddering  with 
its  impact : 

Which  of  you  have  done  this  ? 

When  Iras  sees  at  a  flash  the  ruin  of  Cleo- 
patra's hopes,  she  puts  in  a  line  and  a  half  the 
commentary  which  the  novelists  of  the  time 
would  have  beaten  out  into  a  page  at  least : 

Finish,  good  lady,  the  bright  day  is  done. 
And  we  are  for  the  dark. 

Though  the  older  romancers,  French  and 
other,  often  attain  in  their  naive  way  to  ap- 


218      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

proximate  effects  of  spontaneity,  the  Eliza- 
bethan novelists,  Greene  as  little  as  any,  had 
not  a  glimpse  of  this  electric  power  of  simple 
and  concentrated  speech  :  they  seefn  literally 
to  have  regarded  their  characters  as  puppets 
for  whom  they  had  to  ''  patter  "  fluently  in 
the  fashion  of  the  actual  puppet  show.  The 
knavish  Gascoigne  alone,  perhaps  in  virtue  of 
recalling  actual  action,  approaches  to  a 
plausible  realism  in  the  talk  of  his  personages. 
Greene,  setting  to  work  on  his  stories  before 
he  had  even  tried  his  hand  on  a  play,  is  as 
voluble  and  as  external  as  well  might  be ; 
and  he  never  gets  abreast  of  his  art.  In  his 
better  plays  he  seems  at  times  really  to 
visualize  a  character ;  and  a  line  or  two  of 
Margaret  at  the  fair  in  Friar  Bacon  and  Friar 
Bungay : 

We  country  sluts  of  merry  Fressingfield, 
Come  to  buy  needless  naughts  to  make  us  fine, 

can  live  in  memory  as  something  of  life  re- 
covered from  oblivion.  But  the  good  women 
in  his  stories,  though  at  times  made  thinkable 
in  respect  of  their  action,  never  strike  this 
note  in  their  talk.  They  remain  moralizing 
or  euphuizing  rhetoricians,  literally  "talking 
like  a  book  " — the  book  of  Euphues — with 
a  deadly  verbosity,  and  wholly  failing  to 
materialize  for  us  as  real  people.  Curiously 
enough,  the  bad  women,  whom  he  almost 
never  introduces  in  his  plays,  come  nearer 


PROSE   FICTION  219 

creating  the  artistic  illusion.  At  bottom,  it 
may  be  suspected,  lies  the  economic  bane, 
the  need  to  produce  rapidly  a  considerable 
mass  of  manuscript,  paid  for  at  a  low  rate. 
Hence  hasty  narrative,  and  an  infinity  of 
declamation  in  place  of  possible  dialogue. 

It  is  to  Nashe  in  fiction,  as  in  humorous 
prose,  that  we  must  turn  for  our  best  taste  of 
the  time.  The  Unfortunate  Traveller  (1593) 
may  have  Seen  motived  by  the  Spanish 
picaresque  romance  Lazarillo  de  Tormes,  trans- 
lated in  1576 ;  but  it  is  developed  in  a 
quite  independent  way,  with  a  range  of  effect, 
tragic  and  comic,  which  the  Spanish  master- 
piece does  not  cover.  It  begins  in  a  quite 
circumstantial  fashion  with  the  picaresque 
reminiscences  of  the  page  Jack  Wilton,  at 
the  siege  of  Tournay  and  Terouanne  in  the 
reign  of  Henry  VIII.  Thence  Jack  returns 
to  England,  to  be  driven  forth  again  by  the 
sweating  sickness  ;  and  the  scene  changes  to 
Munster,  where  we  witness  the  destruction 
of  the  Anabaptists  led  by  John  of  Leiden. 
Famous  men  come  into  the  narrative ;  first, 
the  poet  Earl  of  Surrey,  then  Erasmus  and 
Thomas  More,  concerning  whom  Nashe  says 
but  little,  checking  here  his  abundant  vein  of 
invention  and  commentary,  and  contenting 
himself  with  citing  their  known  opinions. 
With  less  eminent  personages  his  wit  plays 
freely  :  and  the  description  of  a  disputation 
of  orators  at  Wittemberg  is  one  of  the  hap- 


220      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

piest  of  his  extravaganzas.  Surrey,  in  whose 
service  Jack  Wilton  enters,  is  duly  carried 
to  Italy,  where  he  never  was,  legend  here 
supplying  Nashe  with  matter. 

From  this  point  adventurous  incident 
multiplies,  very  much  in  the  fashion  later 
associated  with  Defoe,  but  with  less  than  his 
regard  for  decorum.  Jack  Wilton's  tale  is 
in  fact  the  first  effective  autobiographical 
romance  in  English,  and  at  the  same  time  the 
first  realistic  tale  of  modern  life,  apart  from 
Greene's  accounts  of  the  ways  of  criminals. 
Written  in  the  incomparably  racy  English  of 
which  Nashe  was  the  sole  master,  with  all 
his  wealth  of  vivid  comment,  it  constitutes  a 
new  departure  in  Tudor  literature.  And  yet, 
strange  to  say,  it  had  no  such  vogue  as  was 
won  by  many  of  the  euphuistic  romances 
of  Greene.  Either  Nashe's  realism  was  too 
gross  for  the  "  Gentlemen  Readers  " — and  it 
can  be  gross  enough — or  the  very  idea  of 
realism  in  prose  fiction  was  still  too  strange 
for  the  reading  world  to  welcome.  We  are 
to  remember  that  neither  biography  nor 
autobiography  could  yet  be  said  to  exist  in 
English,  Fulke  Greville's  Life  of  Sidney 
being  left  for  the  next  age ;  and,  strange  as 
the  idea  may  seem  to-day,  the  autobiographical 
form  of  Nashe's  romance  would  itself,  pro- 
bably, be  an  odd  novelty.  Yet  he  is  tolerably 
conventional  in  the  harangues  which  he  puts 
in  the  mouths  of  villains  and  victims  in  some 


PROSE  FICTION  221 

of  his  most  desperate  scenes.  Here  he  dis- 
plays in  some  degree  the  common  weakness 
of  his  art  in  his  time,  resorting  to  formal 
rhetoric  for  lack  of  due  intensity  of  psychic 
force.  It  is  as  a  humorist  that  he  is  most 
himself.  But  between  the  freshness  and  verve 
of  his  invention  and  description,  and  his  wild 
variety  of  realistic  incident,  his  performance 
is  as  remarkable  as  its  failure  to  win  vogue 
or  set  a  fashion.  On  the  side  of  fiction,  once 
more,  English  taste  was  as  yet  merely  nascent. 
A  less  gifted  writer,  who  passed  out  of  sight 
within  a  century,  after  having  been  much 
more  popular  than  Nashe,  is  found  to  be 
much  more  obviously  in  the  direct  line  of 
evolution.  Thomas  Deloney,  weaver,  pamph- 
leteer, and  ballad-maker,  struck  out  a  species 
of  simple  story-telling  which  was  greatly  to 
the  taste  of  immediate  posterity,  and  has 
plain  affinities  with  the  more  developed 
English  novel  of  the  eighteenth  century. 
Probably  descended  from  a  French  Hugue- 
not named  Delaunay,  he  may  have  known 
French  ;  but  his  way  of  working  is  substan- 
tially English,  as  are  his  themes.  The  Plea- 
sant History  of  Jack  of  Newberie  (1597)  and 
The  Pleasant  History  of  Thomas  of  Beading 
(1599)  proceed  on  English  traditions  and 
deal  with  English  life,  English  places,  Eng- 
lish names — a  simple  bid  for  popularity  which 
had  not  suggested  itself  to  Lilly,  Sidney, 
Greene,  or  Lodge.     The  art,  sooth  to  say,  is 


222      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

crude  enough.  Jack  of  Newberie  first  pre- 
sents the  beginnings  of  John  Winchcomb,  a 
celebrated  weaver,  who  rose  to  be.  master  of 
two  hundred  workers  in  Henry  VIII's  time  ; 
telKng  how  his  master's  widow  insisted  on 
marrying  him  ;  whereafter  a  standing  comic 
story  of  a  staid  husband  and  an  unruly  wife  is 
made  to  do  biographical  duty.  Jack's  second 
marriage,  however,  is  treated  with  true  local 
colour ;  and  his  services  with  his  company 
of  armed  journeymen  at  the  battle  of  Flodden 
are  made  much  of,  with  songs  and  ballads 
to  diversify  the  entertainment.  For  lack  of 
narrative  matter,  chapter  fifth  is  constituted 
of  a  list  "  of  the  pictures  which  Jack  of 
Newbery  had  in  his  house,  whereby  he  en- 
couraged his  servants  to  seek  for  fame  and 
dignity,"  the  said  pictures  being  portraits  of 
kings,  emperors,  and  popes,  plus  one  philo- 
sopher, who  had  all  risen  to  greatness  from 
lowly  status  ;  and  chapter  sixth  deals  with 
the  difficulties  set  up  by  legislative  restraints 
on  trade.  Thereafter  come  episodes  slenderly 
connected  with  the  hero,  rounding  the  book 
off  into  a  medley  of  quasi-biography  and 
romantic  anecdote. 

Deloney's  most  ambitious  composition  is 
The  Gentle  Craft,  in  two  parts  (1597-8),  "  a 
Discourse  containing  many  matters  of  Delight, 
very  pleasant  to  be  read :  Shewing  what 
famous  men  have  been  shoemakers  in  time 
past  in  this  land,  with  their  worthy  deeds  and 


PROSE   FICTION  223 

great  hospitality.  Set  forth  with  Pictures, 
and  variety  of  Wit  and  Mirth.  Declaring  the 
cause  why  it  is  called  the  Gentle  Craft,  and 
also  how  the  proverb  first  grew.  A  Shoe- 
maker's Son  is  a  Prince  born.  T.  D."  The 
heroes  and  heroines  of  the  first  part  of 
the  medley  are  St.  Hugh  and  Winifred ;  the 
brothers  Crispianus  and  Crispine,  and  Ursula  ; 
and  Simon  Eyre  of  London ;  and  its  popu- 
larity is  attested  by  Dekker's  adoption  of 
the  last  tale  as  the  basis  of  his  Shoemaker's 
Holiday,  But  there  is  no  artistic  advance 
in  Deloney's  work,  which  indeed  was  packed 
within  a  space  of  some  three  years.  His 
simple  ambitions  were  confined  to  multiply- 
ing episodic  interest ;  and  though  his  ordinary 
style  has  the  merit  of  a  simplicity  disdained 
by  the  leading  story- writers  of  the  age,  he  did 
not  scruple  to  borrow  some  of  their  euphuistic 
devices  for  purposes  of  embellishment. 

In  sum,  he  is  an  attractive  if  undistin- 
guished figure,  a  man  of  the  people,  who  knew 
their  life,  and  might  have  deserved  better  of 
us  if  he  had  been  content  to  tell  of  it  more 
carefully.  But  he,  like  his  more  cultured 
congeners,  was  mainly  concerned  to  make  a 
living  by  his  pen- work ;  and  the  result  is  a 
miscellany  of  tales,  ballads,  and  pamphlets 
which  attest  rather  his  cheerful  industry 
than  his  inspiration.  It  is  as  an  early  appren- 
tice in  what  was  one  day  to  become  a  great 
art  that  he  appeals  to  the  student  now. 


224    ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 
CHAPTER    X 

THE   LATER   DRAMATISTS 

For  some  of  those  who  most  keenly  realize 
the  marvellousness  of  Shakespeare's  power, 
there  is  a  certain  difficulty  in  grouping  him 
with  his  corrivals.  It  seems  a  case  of 
"  Eclipse  first  and  the  rest  nowhere."  Genius 
seems  to  obliterate  mere  talent,  as  the  sun's 
light  the  stars.  But  in  all  such  impressions, 
which  belong  specifically  to  the  psychosis  of 
youth,  there  is  something  of  hallucination, 
even  if  "  whom  genius  deludes  is  well  de- 
luded." Much  of  the  intensity  of  the  im- 
pression made  by  Shakespeare  is  due  to  the 
unmatchable  charm  of  his  verse-rhythm ; 
though  his  Falstaff-scenes  sufficiently  remind 
us  that  his  amazing  power  of  seizing  character 
^  something  over  and  above  his  poetry. 
^But  Marlowe  of  the  mighty  line  is  in  his 
elemental  way  a  master  too  ;  and  Ben  Jon- 
son,  who  had  a  gift  for  prose  proper  that^ 
Shakespeare  lacked,  is  a  memorable  dramatic " 
figure.  The  inferiority  of  these  powerful 
workers  may  be  summed  up  in  saying  that  in 
them  the  elements  of  greatness  are  much  less 
happily  mixed, 

Jonson,  like  Marlowe,  comes  forward  ill 
revolt  against  other  men's  dramatic  methods  ; 
but  his  revolt  is  in  the  spirit  of  prose,  whereas 
Marlowe's  was  in  the  spirit  of  one  vein  of 
poetry.     The  musical  charm  of  Shakespeare's 


THE  LATER  DRAMATISTS       225 

comedies,  with  their  plots  from  rom.ance  and 
wonderland,  seems  to  have  been  ahen  to 
Jonson's  critical  bent ;  though  in  his  masques 
and  other  later  works  he  partly  harks  back 
to  it.  The  pursuit  of  sensuous  beauty  of 
sound  by  Spenser,  at  the  cost  of  verbiage,  left 
him  equally  cold.  Himself  "  rammed  with 
life,"  he  demanded  a  drama  that  should  por- 
tray the  "  humours  "  or  idiosyncrasies  of  the 
life  around  him ;  oddly  limiting  his  plea, 
however,  to  the  case  of  comedy.  In  tragedy 
he  cleaved  to  the  ant 'que,  producing  his 
Sejanus  (1603),  and  Catiline  (1609)  with  an 
immensity  of  labour  and  documentary  learn- 
ing of  which  no  previous  playwright  had 
dreamt.  But  it  was  to  comedy  that  he  gave 
most  of  his  creative  effort ;  and  it  was  in  this 
that  he  made  his  mark,  in  so  far  as  he  found 
theatrical  success  at  all.  In  the  Prologue 
to  Every  Man  in  his  Humour  he  scoffs,  as^ 
Sidney  had  done,  at  the  plays  in  which  a 
personage  grows  from  an  infant  to  an  old 
man  ;  and  no  less  at  the  chronicle  plays,  with 
their  properties  of  "  some  few  foot-and-half- 
foot-swords,"  their  chorus  which  "  wafts  you 
o'er  the  seas,"  their  mechanism  of  lowered 
thrones ;  and  their  squibs,  stage-thunder, 
and  drum-storms.     He  will  give,  not  these. 

But  deeds,  and  language  such  as  men  do  use. 
And  persons  such  as  comedy  would  choose 
Wlien  she  would  show  an  image  of  the  times. 
And  sport  with  human  follies,  not  with  crimes, 

15 


226      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

To  this  claim  he  does  not  strictly  live  up : 
his  Volpone  will  not  square  with  his  doctrine. 
But  in  Every  Man  in  his  Humour  he  sought 
to  fulfil  it,  making  the  action  turn  solely  on 
the  play  of  tics  of  character  and  tricks  of 
action  in  a  day  of  London  life,  without  a 
touch  of  romance  or  poetry.  It  is  all  as 
original  and  as  powerful  in  its  own  way  as 
Marlowe's  tragedy ;  and  he  who  would  seek 
the  local  colour  of  Cockney  life  in  that  day 
should  peruse  the  piece,  with  the  later 
Bartholomew's  Fair,  and  the  trilogy  of  West- 
ward Ho,  Eastward  Ho,  and  Northward  Ho^ 
in  the  second  of  which  Jonson  collaborated 
with  Chapman  and  Marston  ;  the  others  being 
by  Dekker  and  Webster. 
/^  But  Jonson's  comedy  is  joyless,  and  his 
f  serried  tragedy  cold.     They  are  alike  travails 

of  understanding  rather  than  of  art ;   labours 
J  of  the  faculty  of  moral  criticism,  not  births  of  V 

SC  artistic  genius.  The  labour  is  so  strenuous 
and  the  critical  faculty  so  vigorous  that  they 
compel  critical  interest ;  but  we  are  con- 
scious always  of  an  appeal  rather  to  a  jury 
\/  collected  to  censure  manners  and  indict  follies 
^  and  crimes  thjmJta-miC,.spontaneous__s^^ 
trutjilojife,  and  our  interest  in  a  sequence  of 
events.  Even  in  his  realistic  comedy  he 
clings  to  the  unrealistic  expedient  of  the 
soliloquy ;  and  he  is  capable  of  making  a 
soliloquist  express  a  fear  that  he  may  have 
been  overheard — a  crudity  of  art  from  which 


THE  LATER  DRAMATISTS      227 

the  mature  Shakespeare  would  have  recoiled. 
The  characters,  too,  always  tend  to  be  mere 
characteristics  personified ;  the  satire  and 
the  censure  overlay  the  action,  alike  in 
tragedy  and  in  comedy ;  and  the  fun  is 
strident  in  the  lightest  scenes.  To  use  an 
overworn  but  convenient  term,  Jonson  is  not 
sympathetic.  He  rarely,  in  Walton's  pj;^j:^se, 
"handles  his  frog  as*iFh'£l£y^e|irW^''  There 
is  niore  of  pure  laughter  in  one  Falstaff  scene 
than^n^  all  BeE^^  for  "  lmmP>W^'  in 

his  han(Is'""sel3oi]a  idsqs,  f rom  its  prijpQ^y.  to 

iiLIS2^!££B«^§^^^<i3^^^^  ^^  ^^^  plays  in  which 
he  thrashes  his  hostile  rivals,  Marston  and 
Dekker,  we  hear  rather  the  stertorous  snort  of 
defiance  than  the  chuckle  of  the  true  humorist. 
One  of  the  likeliest  of  the  guesses  which 
identify  personalities  in  some  of  the  plays  of 
the  period  is  that  which  finds  in  Alexander's 
description  of  Ajax  in  Troilus  and  Cressida 
Shakespeare's  riposte  for  some  of  Jonson's 
jovial  jeers  at  him  or  his  comrades.  In  The 
Return  from  Parnassus  {circa  1601),  one  of  a 
set  of  university  plays  in  which  actors  and 
poets  are  satirized  and  criticized,  one  of  the 
lampooned  players  tells  how 

Few  of  the  university  pen  plays  well. . . .  Why  here's 
our  fellow  Shakespeare  puts  them  all  down — ^ay, 
and  Ben  Jonson  too.  O  !  that  Ben  Jonson  is  a  pesti- 
lent fellow  ;  he  brought  up  Horace,  giving  the  poets 
a  pill ;  but  our  fellow  Shakespeare  hath  given  him 
a  purge,  that  made  him  bewray  his  credit. 


228      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

If  the  "  purge  "  is  still  extant,  it  may  well 
consist  of  the  passage  in  question : 

This  man,  lady,  hath  robbed  many  bea'sts  of  then* 
particular  additions  ;  he  is  valiant  as  the  lion,  chur- 
lish as  the  bear,  slow  as  the  elephant ;  a  man  in 
whom  nature  hath  so  crowded  humours,  that  his 
valour  is  crushed  into  folly,  his  folly  sauced  with 
discretion  ;  there  is  no  man  hath  a  virtue  that  he 
hath  not  a  glimpse  of  ;  nor  any  man  an  attaint,  but 
he  carries  some  stain  of  it :  he  is  melancholy  without 
cause,  and  merry  against  the  hair :  He  hath  the 
joints  of  everything,  but  everything  so  out  of  joint 
that  he  is  a  gouty  Briareus,  many  hands  and  no  use  ; 
or  purblind  Argus,  all  eyes  and  no  sight. 

As  a  genially  satirical  account  of  Jonson, 
this  comes  terribly  near  the  mark  ;  and  it 
constitutes  a  far  keener  thrust  than  the 
virulent  caricature  by  Dekker  in  Satiro- 
mastix^  v^here  Jonson  is  presented  as  a  bully 
and  coward  on  the  lines  of  his  own  Bobadill. 
There  is  no  such  venom  in  the  Ajax  portrait : 
Shakespeare  had  none;  and  Jonson's  ostensible 
reply  in  the  dialogue  appended  to  The  Poet- 
aster : 

Only  amongst  them  I  am  sorry  for 
Some  better  natures  by  the  rest  so  drawn 
To  run  in  that  vile  line, 

is  worthy  enough,  though  he  certainly  had 
been  the  aggressor.  Thirteen  years  later,  in 
Bartholomew  Fair,  he  gibes  anew  at  the  "  ser- 
vant-master "  in  the  Tempest ,  For  him, 
Caliban   was   neither   comedy   nor   tragedy. 


THE  LATER  DRAMATISTS       229 

But  it  is  a  complete  error  to  suppose  that 
Jonson  was  personally  hostile  to  Shake- 
speare. His  lines  on  the  Poet-Ape,  often 
quoted  as  evidence  of  such  enmity,  were 
launched  at  another  mark :  Dekker  and 
Marston  in  the  Satiromastix  show  that  they 
both  took  the  epithet  to  themselves  ;  and  it 
could  be  no  false  friend  who  penned  the 
superb  eulogy  of  the  dead  Shakespeare  in  the 
lines  prefixed  to  the  folio  of  the  plays  in  1623. 
Jonson  of  all  men  in  that  day  was  least  likely 
to  fail  to  see  the  supreme  beauty  of  the  great 
lines  in  the  Tempest^  however  he  might  gird 
at  the  machinery  or  the  characters  of  wonder- 
land ;  and  there  is  much  reason  to  think  that 
the  friends,  however  each  might  banter  the 
other  on  his  differing  bias,  learned  some- 
thing from  each  other  all  along.  There  is 
great  probability  in  the  legend  that  Shake- 
speare secured  the  acceptance  by  his  com- 
pany of  Every  Man  in  his  Humour  :  he  was 
the  man  to  see  at  once  its  new  power  in  its 
own  kind,  and  to  admit  that  his  own  romantic 
comedy  was  not  the  last  word  in  the  lighter 
drama.  After  Jonson's  new  departure  he 
significantly  turns  to  tragedy ;  and  between 
his  comedy  period  and  Hamlet  he  is  seen  to 
have  reached  a  new  power  of  blank  verse. 
This,  in  turn,  appears  to  be  quickly  reflected 
in  Sejanus  (1603),  where  Jonson  shows  a  power 
to  produce  newly  varied  verse-rhythm  above 
which  he  never  afterwards  rose.     Even  in  his 


230    ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

later  comedy,  as  in  his  masques,  Ben  betrays 
a  craving  after  that  charm  of  poetry  in  action 
which  in  Shakespeare  was  primordial ;  and 
which  to-day  delights  men  and  women  as 
it  did  in  his  own  time.  Perhaps  Ben  sus- 
pected that  the  pursuit  of  realism  on  his  lines 
had,  after  all,  not  led  him  any  nearer  reality 
than  Twelfth  Night  and  As  You  Like  lU 
where  no  contemporary  is  lampooned,  where 
the  sun  shines  on  the  just  and  the  unjust, 
and  where  real  human  nature  runs  joyously 
through  plots  framed  to  charm  away  care. 
On  his  Poetaster  and  Cynthia's  Revels^  with 
their  tedious  and  obscure  controversy,  and 
their  long-drawn  censorious  plan,  he  could 
hardly  look  back  with  pleasure. 

Avowedly  he  had  piqued  himself  upon 
*'  invention,"  refusing  to  avail  himself,  as  did 
Shakespeare,  of  the  mass  of  plots  given  to 
the  playwright's  hand  in  the  Palace  of  Plea- 
sure and  other  collections  of  Italian  and 
French  tales.  Yet  in  the  first  draught  of 
Every  Man  in  his  Humour  he  had  given  his 
characters  Italian  names  in  the  usual  way ; 
and  in  point  of  fact  he  could  not  help  copying 
the  character-types  of  previous  drama.  His 
Bohadill  is  a  variant  of  the  Basilisco  of  Kyd's 
Soliman  andPerseda ;  who,  in  turn,  is  modelled 
after  the  Captain  Crackstone  of  the  old  Two 
Italian  Gentlemen  ;  who  follows  Italian  types 
that  go  back  to  Plautus.  It  needed  a  more 
plastic  and  sympathetic  faculty  than  Jon- 


THE  LATER  DRAMATISTS       231 

son's  to  reflect  from  the  medley  of  actual  life 
at  once  convincing  personalities  and  con- 
nected actions  of  a  commanding  interest. 

Yet  in  the  way  of  hard  exaggerative 
photography  it  would  be  difficult  to  exceed 
the  sardonic  force  of  such  plays  as  The 
Alchemist  and  Bartholomew  Fair;  the  first 
so  perfect  in  structure,  the  second  so  over- 
whelming in  its  pell-mell  of  riotous,  clamor- 
ous, vulgar  life.  And  the  other  realistic 
plays  of  Jon  son  are  only  less  remarkable 
for  their  laboured  power.  It  is  not  life 
that  we  see  in  Volpone  or  in  The  New  Inn : 
it  is  the  massive  effort  of  a  determined 
censor  of  life  to  shape  alternately  a  mina- 
tory and  an  attractive  action,  in  one 
making  life  unnaturally  odious,  in  another 
unnaturally  charming.  But  if  we  were  to 
measure  the  work  solely  by  Ruskin's  test  of 
the  "  amount  of  mind  to  the  square  inch," 
we  should  have  to  place  it  high  indeed. 
One  secret  of  all  great  art  is  the  absorption  of 
the  artist  in  his  subject,  and  we  can  see 
Jonson  grappled  to  his.  His  explosive  de- 
fiance of  such  playwrights  as  Dekker  and 
Marston  came  of  his  contemptuous  sense  of 
their  relative  levity  of  artistic  temper,  as  well 
as  of  his  wrath  at  their  contemptuous  retorts 
upon  his  own  confident  pretension  to  have 
the  only  right  method  ;  and  in  that  contempt 
he  never  included  Shakespeare,  however  he 
might  deride  romanticism  as  such.     He  knew 


232      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

that  no  play  of  theirs  was  ever  thought  and 
wrought  out  as  was  the  sHghtest  of  Shake- 
speare's.    But  he  was  slow  to  see  that  their 
irregular  faculty  was  from  time  to  time  lit 
up  by  gleams  of  genius  of  a  kind  he  did  not 
possess.     Perhaps  a  recognition  of  it  underlay 
his  reconciliation  with  Marston.     In  the  case 
of  Chapman  his  recognition  had  been  prompt : 
the  scholarship  as  well  as  the  power  and  in- 
tensity of  that  kindred  fighter  was  bound  to 
win  him. 
f      Marston,  Dekker,  Heywood,  Chapman,  and 
']  Middleton  all  belong  in  their  beginnings  to 
i  Elizabeth's  reign,  and  with  Shakespeare  and 
l^Jonson    they    form    an    unparalleled    group. 
j  Dekker  may  have  begun  playwriting  about 
I  1594  or  earlier  ;   Chapman  about  1596  ;  Mar- 
j  ston  and  Heywood  not  till  1599  ;    Middleton 
\jiot  till  1602.      Of  the  five,  Dekker  had  on 
the  whole  the  happiest   dramatic  gifts,  and 
the  least  happy  life ;    and  though  Jonson  in 
cold  blood  called  him  a  rogue,  and  even  harder 
things   have   been   said   of  him   later,    it   is 
difficult  to  dislike  him.     In  Lamb's  view,  he 
had  "  poetry  enough  for  anything  "  ;   and  to 
read  Old  Fortunatus  is  to  come  near  assenting. 
His  Shoemaker's  Holiday   (1599)   shows  the 
influence  of  Greene  ;   but  it  has  a  hearty  and 
cheerful  comedy  strain  which  was  approached 
by    Greene    only    in    George-a-Greene ;     and 
which  differentiates  no  less  from  the  harder 
brilliance  of  Jonson.     As  a  kindly  picture  of 


THE   LATER  DRAMATISTS       233 

old  London  trade  life,  touched  with  romanti- 
cism, it  makes  an  appeal  which  the  ''Ho!" 
group  of  bustling  Cockney  comedies  never 
do ;  the  reason  being  that  realism  must  be 
very  well  done  indeed  to  attain  artistic  unity, 
while  a  romantic  plot  has  a  unifying  force 
not  so  hard  to  attain. 

No  such  interest  attaches  to  the  comedy 
of  Patient  Grissel  (1599),  in  which  Dekker 
collaborated  with  Chettle.  That  impossible 
heroine  is  here  as  incredible  as  in  any  other 
presentment  of  her,  while  the  husband  is 
gratuitously  detestable  ;  and  the  minor  char- 
acters are  unoriginal  and  unreal.  Much  more 
attractive  is  Old  Fortunatus,  a  play  telling 
of  the  example  not  only  of  Greene  but  of 
Marlowe,  whose  early  verse  is  so  often  echoed 
that  it  is  not  possible  confidently  to  reject 
the  opinion  that  the  First  Part  was  written 
as  early  as  1590.  In  any  case  it  belongs 
definitely  to  the  pre-Jonsonian  and  romantic 
drama,  in  which  some  transcriptions  from 
contemporary  life  are  placed  in  a  plot  "  out 
of  space,  out  of  time  "  ;  realism  relieving 
fairy-tale,  and  prose  relieving  poetry.  It 
cannot  be  said  to  attain  greatness  ;  but  it  has 
energy  and  originality  enough  to  make  us 
look  for  great  work  at  its  author's  hands. 

Only  in  a  slight  degree  is  the  hope  fulfilled. 
In  The  Honest  Whore  and  The  Witch  of  Edmon- 
ton, both  written  in  collaboration,  Dekker's 
original   gift  of  kindly   sympathy  plays  to 


234      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

good  purpose,  though  in  the  former  the  spirit 
of  reaUsra  is  burdened  on  the  one  hand  by 
resort  to  the  favourite  EHzabethan  form  of 
extravaganza — madhouse  scenes — and  on  the 
other  by  compHcation  of  plot.  The  artistic 
merit  of  the  first  play,  in  both  parts,  inheres 
in  the  title-character,  who  turns  honest 
woman  as  the  wife  of  the  caitiff  who  had  first 
wronged  her  and  continues  to  wrong  her  as 
her  husband.  For  the  impossible  conception 
of  Grissel  there  is  here  substituted  a  possible 
one ;  and  the  self-reclaimed  sinner  is  a  hun- 
dred times  more  lifelike  than  the  all-enduring 
saint.  No  less  convincing  is  the  study  of  her 
father,  sound  all  through  as  she  was  at  heart, 
and  therefore  caj>able  of  heartily  forgiving, 
when  she  has  redeemed  herself,  the  daughter 
who  had  shamed  him.  In  such  work  as  this, 
as  in  the  better  plays  of  Thomas  Heywood, 
we  have  the  clearest  anticipation  of  the  Vic- 
torian novel,  wherein  the  reactions  of  character 
become  the  motive  and  basis  of  the  perform- 
ance, unhampered  by  the  excrescences  result- 
ing from  the  supposed  necessities  of  the 
Elizabethan  theatre.  Collaboration  in  Dek- 
ker's  case  meant  a  combination  of  plot 
motives,  with  a  resulting  loss  of  homogeneity ; 
but  it  would  seem  to  be  to  his  realistic  talent 
that  we  owe  the  strong  character- work  of  the 
play  ;  though  the  instability  of  critical  taste 
which,  no  less  than  insecurity  of  genius,  puts 
all  the  dramatists  of  the  age  upon  a  lower 


THE  LATER  DRAMATISTS       235 

plane  than  Shakespeare,  was  only  too  fully 
shared  by  Dekker. 

It  is  on  the  general  ground  of  his  gift  of 
sympathy,  together  with  cues  of  style,  that 
we  are  led  to  assign  to  him  the  most  remark- 
able feature  of  The  Witch  of  Edmonton^ 
the  partly  sympathetic  presentment  of  the 
title-character  there.  Only  in  Shakespeare's 
handling  of  Shylock  do  we  have  any  such 
dramatic  refinement  upon  popular  prejudice 
as  is  here  achieved  in  dealing  with  a  figure 
much  more  familiar  in  England  than  the 
usurious  Jew.  That  such  a  theme  for  real 
everyday  tragedy  was  never  taken  up  by  the 
great  master,  is  one  of  the  grounds  for  regret 
as  to  the  special  directions  given  to  his; 
genius.  In  Macbeth  the  witches,  perhaps 
copied  from  another  play,  are  essentially 
supernatural  and  merely  evil  figures,  as  they- 
had  need  be  in  a  play  that  was  to  please  the 
witch-fearing  James  I.  It  was  left  to  Dekker; 
to  remind  us — without  venturing  on  a  whollj^ 
sympathetic  picture — how  horribly  the  popu- 
lar superstition  wrought  to  create  the  monster^ 
of  its  imagination,  breeding  evil  where  it 
feared  evil,  and  making  a  persecuted  victim: 
of  its  fancied  persecutor. 

But  of  this  notable  faculty  there  is^  no^ 
further  notable  fruit.  Whether  because  of 
lack  of  gift  on  the  part  of  the  authors  or  the 
actors,  or  by  reason  of  immaturity  of  taste* 
among   the   publio,    realistic   tragedy   never 


236      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

went  far  in  either  Elizabethan  or  Jacobean 
England.  The  predominant  types  were  fin- 
ally romantic  tragedy  and  realistic  comedy, 
with  at  times  a  tragical  turn.  Arden  of 
Feversham  and  the  Warning  for  Fair  Women 
remain  the  only  good  plays  of  the  kind  :  that 
entitled  Two  Tragedies  in  One,  signed  "  Robert 
Yarrington,"  but  probably  the  work  of 
Chettle,  Day,  and  Houghton,  is  clumsy  work 
in  comparison.  The  Yorkshire  Tragedy,  pub- 
lished as  Shakespeare's  in  1608,  but  certainly 
not  from  his  hand  as  it  stands,  appears  to  be 
the  work  of  George  Wilkins,  to  whom  is  to 
be  credited  the  inferior  part  of  Pericles,  so 
obviously  divisible  from  the  rest.  It  is  con- 
ceivable that  Wilkins  may  in  The  Yorkshire 
Tragedy  have  reduced  to  his  own  raw  prose 
the  higher  prose  or  verse  of  the  poet  with 
whom  in  some  fashion  he  took  leave  or  was 
permitted  to  collaborate  ;  but  the  problem 
remains  a  very  obscure  one ;  and  we  can  but 
say  that  the  theme,  the  downward  course  of 
a  headstrong  and  passionate  gambler,  who 
ruins  himself  and  murders  his  family,  might 
have  been  made  by  Shakespeare  a  master- 
piece of  pity  and  terror. 

Dekker,  always  living  from  hand  to  mouth, 
like  most  of  his  tribe,  deteriorated  in  nearly 
every  respect,  and  the  bulk  of  his  preserved 
work  is  not  worth  preserving.  His  life  in 
large  part  anticipated  the  later  sketch  of 
the  career  of  the  hack — "  toil,  envy,  want,  the 


THE  LATER  DRAMATISTS       237 

patron  and  the  jail  " — with  very  Httle  of  the 
patron,  and  a  great  deal  of  the  jail.  Thomas 
Hey  wood,  the  most  fecund  of  all  English 
dramatists,  who  appears  to  have  lived  to  a 
ripe  age  in  comparative  prosperity,  is  not  on 
the  whole  artistically  luckier.  To  the  Eliza- 
bethan time  he  belongs  in  respect  of  his 
Four  Prefitices  of  London — juvenile  work  on  a 
juvenile  theme  ;  his  two  Edward  IV  plays, 
in  which  he  handles  the  story  of  Jane  Shore 
with  a  good  deal  of  elaborated  pathos,  if  not 
with  tragic  force  ;  and  his  masterpiece,  A 
IVoman  Killed  with  Kindness^  which  was 
played  in  1603.  His  tragically  ending  serious 
play  matches  well  with  Dekker's  Honest 
Whore,  though  its  central  character  has  not 
the  "  observed  "  stamp  of  Dekker's  best  work. 
Like  that,  it  suggests  the  germ  of  the  Vic- 
torian novel,  though  it  hints  rather  of  East 
Lynne  than  of  Thackeray  or  of  George  Eliot ; 
and  the  lapse  of  its  erring  woman  is  the  col- 
lapse of  sheer  weakness  rather  than  the 
aberration  of  passionate  will  which  makes 
the  ground  of  the  higher  tragedy.  Long 
afterwards,  in  The  English  Traveller^  Hey- 
wood  handled  a  variant  of  the  same  theme  ; 
and  there,  though  the  characterization  is 
stronger,  the  presentment  is  psychologically 
unconvincing.  Heywood's  talent,  in  fine,  was 
rather  for  pathos  than  for  tragedy,  and,  in 
comedy,  rather  for  good-humour  than  for 
humour.     Some  real  light  he  does  throw  on 


238      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

English  life,  albeit  with  uncertain  hand. 
The  wonder  is  that,  producing  the  mass  of 
playwriting  he  did,  he  so  often  attains  a  good 
level  of  efficiency.  We  have  his  own  assur- 
ance, which  there  is  no  reason  to  doubt,  that 
up  to  1633  he  had  put  his  hand  or  ''  a  main 
finger  "  to  a  hundred  and  twenty  plays  :  a 
testimony  which  conveys  anew  the  open 
secret  of  the  economic  determination,  as  to 
quantity  and  quality,  of  the  bulk  of  the  old 
drama.  Heywood's  output  meant  four  plays 
a  year,  written  or  collaborated  in,  besides  a 
number  of  poems  and  prose  treatises.  More 
prudence,  and  perhaps  a  little  more  industry 
than  belonged  to  Dekker,  enabled  him  to  keep 
his  head  above  water  where  the  other  so  often 
went  under.  But  not  thus  was  greatness  to 
be  attained  in  drama.  It  was  in  respect  of 
his  income  from  his  partnership  in  his  theatre- 
company  that  Shakespeare  was  enabled  to 
put  out  his  full  power  in  the  latter  half  of  his 
twenty  or  more  years  of  playmaking.  As  a 
mere  dramatist,  he  could  not  have  lived  by 
his  writing. 

It  was  presumably  economic  compulsion 
that  drove  George  Chapman  to  playwriting, 
for  which  he  was  imperfectly  gifted.  His  first 
signed  play,  The  Blind  Beggar  of  Alexandria 
(1598),  has  no  psychic  or  poetic  merit,  though 
it  shows  a  certain  fertility  in  devices  of  plot. 
Echoing  Marlowe,  Greene,  and  Peele,  he  had 
not  yet  found  any  fit  path  for  himself  in 


THE   LATER  DRAMATISTS       239 

drama,  though  he  was  about  forty  years  old  ; 
and  not  till  he  had  done  several  realistic 
comedies,  and  collaborated  with  Jonson  and 
Marston  in  Eastward  Ho,  in  which  an  attack 
upon  the  Scots  served  to  bring  all  three  to 
prison,  did  he  turn  his  hand  to  the  form  of 
tragedy  in  which  he  was  able  to  make  an 
original  mark.  That  he  did  so  while  carrying 
on  his  great  task  of  translating  Homer  is  one 
of  the  proofs  of  his  power,  though  he  never 
produced  a  satisfying  masterpiece.  Far  in* 
ferior  to  Shakespeare,  inferior  even  to  Jonson, 
in  the  power  of  "  seeing  life  steadily  and  see- 
ing it  whole  "  ;  inferior  even  to  lesser  men  in 
the  power  to  round  and  balance  a  play,  he 
had  in  him  the  tragic  spirit ;  and  he  created 
truly  tragic  characters,  compact  of  passion, 
however  unduly  given  to  complicated  de- 
clamation. We  cannot  say  of  his  tragedy, 
as  of  Jonson's,  that  it  is  cold.  Yet  on  this 
path  he  falls  behind  Jonson  in  point  of  san- 
ity and  self-command.  Bussy  d^Ambois,  in 
several  respects  his  greatest  work,  is  sadly 
flawed  by  an  absurd  use  of  the  device  of  the 
ghost ;  and  he  always  lacks  variety  of 
characterization,  though  he  often  attains  in- 
tensity. None  of  his  comedy  characters  lives 
for  us  as  several  of  Jonson's  do,  to  say  no- 
thing of  the  comedy  of  Beaumont  and 
Fletcher.  Poet  as  he  essentially  was,  he 
cannot  touch  with  poetry  his  women  in 
comedy,   hardly   even   in  tragedy ;     and   in 


240      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

both  orders  alike  he  seems  never  to  see  his 
wood  for  the  trees.  With  a  great  faculty  for 
passionate  but  turgid  rhetoric,  he  lacks  that 
power  of  the  arresting,  life-like  phrase  which 
in  Webster  at  times  recalls  Shakespeare  ;  and 
as  an  artist  he  remains  for  us  what  he  shows 
himself  to  be  in  his  first  poems  and  his  ex- 
plosive prefaces,  something  volcanic,  tumul- 
tuous, ill-coordinated :  in  Shakespeare's  phrase, 
a  "  fierce  thing  replete  with  too  much  rage, 
whose  strength's  abundance  weakens  his 
own  heart."  Shakespeare,  we  feel,  though 
we  have  not  a  tolerable  portrait  of  him,  had 
serene  eyes  ;  those  of  Jonson,  in  the  authen- 
tic portrait,  have  an  unexpected,  luminous 
quality  of  reverie  and  self-possession  ;  those 
of  Chapman,  in  his,  have  the  very  rictus  o^ 
angry  self-assertion  and  self-will.  Such  a 
one  could  not  hold  the  mirror  up  to  nature, 
either  dramatically  or  ratiocinatively,  though 
he  could  flash  lightning  upon  her  at  times. 
He  is  at  his  best,  and  is  best  to  be  remembered, 
in  fine  flights  of  moral  poetry,  as  in  the  speech 
of  King  Henry  in  Byron's  Tragedy  (iv.  1) : 

O  thou  that  govern'st  the  keen  sword  of  kings. 

Direct  my  arm  in  this  important  stroke. 

Or  hold  it  being  advanc'd  ;  the  weight  of  blood. 

Even  in  the  basest  subject,  doth  exact 

Deep  consultation  in  the  highest  king  ; 

For  in  one  subject,  death's  unjust  affrights. 

Passions  and  pains,  though  he  be  ne'er  so  poor. 

Ask  more  remorse  than  the  voluptuous  spleens 

Of  all  kings  in  the  world  deserve  respect ; 


THE   LATER   DRAMATISTS       241 

He  should  be  bom  grey-headed  that  will  bear 
The  sword  of  empire. 

No  other  dramatist  within  the  EHzabethan 
limit,  after  Jonson,  can  be  put  wholly  upon 
as  high  a  plane.  John  Marston,  who  set  out 
as  a  slashing  satirist  and  an  erotic  poet,  main- 
tains in  his  plays  some  of  the  offensive  qualities 
of  style  which  repel  in  his  early  verse,  making 
his  characters  talk  with  his  own  thrasonical 
violence.  He  cares  nothing  for  the  economies 
of  drama,  the  technique  of  exposition  and 
gradation  ;  and  his  sudden  rush  of  action  is 
apt  to  be  as  hard  to  understand  as  a  street 
fight.  To  this  day,  indeed,  we  cannot  be 
sure  as  to  his  part  in  The  Malcontent  (1600  ?), 
twice  published  by  the  same  bookseller  in 
1604,  in  the  first  edition  as  the  work  of 
Marston,  in  the  second  as  by  John  Webster, 
with  additions  by  Marston.  We  can  but  say 
that  in  this  play,  as  in  the  earlier  Antonio 
and  Mellida  and  Antonio^s  Revenge,  there  are 
passages  of  harmonious  verse  of  a  brooding, 
pregnant  power  which  seem  to  be  the  result 
of  Marston's  appreciative  listening  to  Shake- 
speare, and  were  apparently  not  within  the 
capacity  of  Webster,  whose  tragic  gift  was 
not  seconded  by  any  genius  for  the  handling 
of  his  verse  instrument. 

Webster  and  the  other  principal  dramatists] 
who  carried  on  the  work  of  the  theatres — 
Rowley,  Ford,  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  and  ' 
Philip    Massinger — are    wholly    outside    our  ; 

16 


242    ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

period  ;  and  cannot  be  here  surveyed  in  any 
detail,  though  an  estabUshed  convention 
makes  the  label  of  Elizabethan  drama  stretch 
down  to  the  reign  of  Charles,  and  cover  the 
work  of  James  Shirley,  who  made  plays  from 
1625  till  the  closing  of  the  theatres  under 
the  Commonwealth.  Taking  the  post-Eliza- 
bethan drama  a^s  a  whole  down  to  that 
terminus,  we  can  hardly  refuse  assent  to  the 
general  verdict  that  it  is  marked  by  the  pro- 
fusion of  decay  ;  though  we  must  not  let  the 
metaphor  carry  for  us  the  implication  that 
an  art-form  is  as  it  were  originally  doomed  to 
degeneration  and  death,  like  a  plant  or  an 
animal.  Given  arts  advance  and  decline  in 
different  periods  and  countries  in  terms  of 
the  total  conditions,  among  which  the  exis- 
tence of  genius  is  not  to  be  posited  as 
conveying  the  whole  explanation.  Original 
genius,  for  one  thing,  after  a  time  recoils  from 
an  art-form  that  has  become  conventional. 
Genius,  for  another  thing,  may  exist  poten- 
tially without  being  evoked ;  and  in  the 
evocation  there  is  always  the  element  of  un- 
traced  causation,  which  we  call  "  chance." 

Perhaps  the  sociology  of  the  matter  may 
be  reasonably  indicated  thus.  The  dramatic 
efflorescence  of  the  last  fifteen  or  twenty  years 
of  Elizabeth's  reign  was  one  of  the  results  of 
a  rapid  fertilization  of  the  English  intelligence 
by  a  variety  of  forms  of  foreign  culture,  under 
fostering    social    and    economic    conditions. 


THE   LATER  DRAMATISTS       243 

which  brought  together  a  handful  of  play- 
wrights of  varying  degrees  of  genius,  one  of 
them  supremely  gifted.  To  his  topmost 
height,  no  one  else  ever  attained.  In  the 
next  age,  new  culture  of  the  required  kind 
did  not  pour  in  as  before.  There  are  many 
testimonies  to  the  effect  that  in  the  eyes  of 
foreign  scholars  the  English  intellect  under 
James  turned  to  reactionary  theology.  But 
that  absorption  and  the  concomitant  political 
tension  meant,  among  other  things,  the  turn- 
ing of  vigorous  minds  in  an  increasing  degree 
away  from  belles  lettres  and  towards  problems 
of  creed  and  action.  Above  all,  the  constant 
record  of  the  playwriting  career  was  one  of 
hardship,  of  toil  which  brought  no  monetary 
competence,  of  irksome  dependence  on  pri- 
vate bounty.  Jonson  had  relatively  high 
earning  power  in  various  kinds  ;  but  like 
all  the  dramatists  who  had  no  partnership  in 
the  theatres,  he  was  chronically  short  of 
funds,  and  had  to  solicit  gifts.  Massinger  was 
only  less  impecunious  than  Dekker.  This 
tale  of  hardship  was  not  likely  to  attract 
judicious  men ;  and  the  purely  artistic 
temperament  is  no  guarantee  for  good  sense. 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  indeed,  were  both 
"  well-born,"  the  first  being  the  son  of  a 
judge,  the  second  the  son  of  a  bishop  ;  and 
they  presumably  did  not  feel  the  pressure  of 
want ;  but  they  both  died  young,  Beaumont 
in  iai6.  Fletcher  m  \m^      After  that  date, 


,,},,,J^^      -t^.^^      /k«^«vA     <i<       >rcw^    .•    .^' 

244      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

serious  people  were  increasingly  indifferent 
or  hostile  to  the  theatre  ;  and  plays  were 
written  for  less  critical  and  thoughtful  audi- 
ences. Thus  the  standard  of  taste  declined 
with  the  decline  in  The  quality  of  the  recruits 
to  the  profession  of  playmaking. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  say,  as  some  do,  that  the 

later  playwrights  were  necessarily  driven  to 

violent  and  unnatural  or  corrupt  effects  by  a 

sheer  exhaustion  of  good  themes.     Itis  trua 

/    that  the  post-Elizabethan  drama  runs  notice- 

^  ably  to  sexual  grossness.  Some  of  the 
situations  in  Heywood's  Golden  Age  and  in 
Fletcher's  Faithful  Shepherdess  {circa  1609), 
outgo  in  immodesty  anything  in  the  older 
drama,  apart  from  Titus  Andronicus ;  and 
Fletcher  in  particular  is  chronically  prurient. 
In  the  Shepherdess  we  have  a  strangely  hypo- 
critical masquerade  of  corruptness  playing 
at  purity,  an  abundance  of  dainty  poetry 
punctuated  with  gross  action,  and  a  winding 
up  of  a  coarse  and  silly  plot  with  a  series  of 
moral  allocutions  from  the  mouths  of  the 
Priest  of  Pan  and  a  satyr.  It  is  a  far  cry 
from  the  Midsummer  Nighfs  Dream  to  this 
indecent  "  morality  play,"  which  partly  paro- 
dies it.  Its  failure  might  seem  to  vindicate 
the  taste  of  the  audiences  ;  but  Fletcher's 
later  work  tells  rather  of  a  lowering  of  their 
standards,  as  if  the  decent  people  had  at  length 
stayed  away.    JBut  the  other  symptoms  cited 

V^    as  degenerate  were  nothing  new.     Violent  and 


THE   LATER  DRAMATISTS       245 

unnatural  effects  were  abundantly  sought  for 
by  dramatists  of  the  '^  first  flight."     Tambur- 
laine  presents  them ;    the  Spanish  Tragedy^ 
SelimuSy  Locrine,  Tancred  and  Gismunda,  and 
David  and  Bethsabe,  rival  any  later  play  in 
sheer   savagery  and  hideous  action ;    Titus 
AndronicuSf   which  is   not   Shakespeare's,  is 
an  accumulation  of  sickening  atrocities  ;  and 
Alphonsus  Emperor  of  Germany,   heedlessly 
ascribed  to   Chapman,   but  really  an  early 
play,  probably  by  Greene  or  Kyd  and  Peele, 
runs    it    hard.     Ford    and    Cyril    Tourneur, 
author   of  The  Atheist's   Tragedy    and    The 
Revenger's  Tragedy  in  the  next  generation, 
were  men  of  neurotic  proclivity,   but  they 
were  not  made  so  by  dearth  of  good  tragic 
plot  material.     Had   Shakespeare  taken  upy 
the  theme  of  Webster's  Duchess  of  Malfi  he\ 
would  have  made  a  play  no  less  tragic,  yetl 
without  conveying  the  sense  of  supereroga-\ 
tion  in  horror  that  is  set  up  by  Webster's  \ 
tragedy.     Webster  was  in  truth  a  dramatist  1 
with  a  very  keen  sense  of  the  wild  play  of  evil  I 
in  life  ;   but  he  would  have  been  so  if  he  had   | 
written  twenty  years  earlier.     Massinger  took 
an  extremely  repulsive  subject  in  The  Un-  ■ 
natural  Combat ;  and  Chapman  dabbled  much 
in  violence ;  but  in  The  Admiral  of  France  he 
found  a  theme  in  no  sense  odious. 

In  some  respects  there  was  actual  develop- 
ment in  dramatic  technique  and  capacity 
among  the  new  men  in  Shakespeare's  closing 


246      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

years,  and  later.  The  author  of  Othello  and 
Lear  would  doubtless  have  acknowledged 
new  forms  of  power  in  Webster  ;  and  the 
complicated  plots  of  the  Winter^s  Tale  and 
Cymbeline  seem  to  show  that  he  took  note  of 
the  new  developments  of  plot  interest  in  the 
work  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  and  even  of 
Dekker.  It  is  not  to  be  denied,  again,  that 
a  number  of  the  young  men  and  women  of 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher's  comedies  tell  of  a 
new  and  felicitous  power  of  portraying  con- 
temporary types.  In  those  comedies,  as  in 
Porter's  Two  Angry  Women  of  Ahington 
(1598),  we  catch  more  glimpses  of  everyday 
English  people  in  their  actual  environment 
than  Shakespeare  has  vouchsafed  us.  Comedy, 
as  we  saw,  steadily  headed  towards  realism 

y/  and  native  life  from  Jonson  onwards.  But 
in  tragedy  there  was  no  equivalent  advance  : 
Fletcher  and  Massinger  alike  sought  their 
tragic  plots  in  remote  history  or  imaginary 
communities  ;  and  for  lack  of  moral  sanity 
and  true  poetic  imagination  they  there  fell 
below  the  level  of  their  achievement  in 
comedy,  to  say  nothing  of  the  mighty  tragedy 
of  Shakespeare. 

^  Above  all  there  was  retrogression  rather 
than  advance  in  the  great  art  of  blank  verse. 
Marston  and  Dekker  caught  somethinjg  of  the 
rhythmic  secrets  of  Shakespeare  ;  and  Beau- 
mont seems  to  have  recognized  that  his  was 
the  ideal  touch ;    but  where  Fletcher  works 


THE   LATER  DRAMATISTS       247 

alone  he  soon  falls  away ;  and  Massinger,  who 
was  less  of  a  lyrist,  does  still  worse.  Dramatic 
blank  verse,  herein  failing  to  assimilate  the 
technique  of  Surrey,  had  begun  with  a 
mechanical  "end-stopped  "  line,  usually  clos- 
ing dutifully  on  a  monosyllable  ;  from  which 
monotony,  before  Shakespeare,  it  began  to 
find  some  relief  in  a  dissyllabic  close;  still, 
however,  without  running  on  the  clause. 
Soon  Shakespeare  assimilated  the  double- 
ending,  and  soon  he  followed  up  that  with 
the  run-on  line,  in  which  the  clause  did  not 
coincide  with  the  rhythmic  bar-measurement. 
Thus,  duly  balancing  double  with  single  end- 
ings, he  brought  blank  verse  to  the  perfection 
of  fluidity  and  ever  varying  pulsation.  Jon- 
son,  though  partly  ready  to  see  the  value  of 
the  varying  pause,  for  lack  of  delicacy  of  ear 
lapsed  into  new  monotonies  by  framing  long 
series  of  lines  ending  in  dissyllables  ;  and 
Chapman,  Fletcher,  and  Massinger  all  fell  into 
the  same  snare.  In  Bussy  d^Ambois,  for  in- 
stance (v,  2),  we  have  one  run  of  eight  such 
endings,  and  in  Every  Man  in  his  Humour 
(i,  1)  a  sequence  of  seven  ;  a  monotony  of 
effect  which  only  a  proportionately  energetic 
variation  of  pause  could  cure.  But  while 
those  poets  do  frequently  vary  their  pauses, 
they  seem  to  have  no  perception  of  their 
monotonies  of  line-ending,  and  are  thus  in- 
calculably disadvantaged  with  all  readers 
sensitive  to  rhythm.     It  would  seem  that  for 


248      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

purposes  of  the  stage,  where  blank  verse  is 
so  seldom  well  delivered,  the  monotony  did 
not  count ;  but  the  lower  standard  of  tech- 
nique can  be  seen  among  the  less  strenuous 
men  to  react  on  the  whole  work  of  composi- 
tion. 

Fletcher's  case  at  first  sight  seems  to  be 
that  of  a  man  sinning  against  light ;  for  if 
the  blank  verse  in  the  first  scene  of  The 
Faithful  Shepherdess,  signed  by  him,  be  his, 
he  began  well.  But  in  terms  of  the  general 
critical  agreement  that  in  the  joint  plays  his 
work  is  to  be  distinguished  by  the  monotonous 
double  endings,  we  are  led  to  suspect  that  the 
small  quantity  of  blank  verse  in  that  early 
piece  is  Beaumont's,  and  that  Fletcher  signed 
it  on  the  strength  of  having  written  the 
rhymed  verse  which  constitutes  nine-tenths 
of  the  whole.  It  would  seem,  in  short,  that 
with  all  his  grace  in  rhyme  and  song  he  lacked 
the  special  faculty  required  for  the  right 
management  of  the  more  difiicult  technique. 
The  fact  that,  as  the  preface  to  the  Shep- 
herdess shows,  he  could  write  a  more  finely 
modulated  prose  than  any  produced  by 
Shakespeare,  is  quite  in  keeping  with  that 
inference.  In  any  case,  he  is  a  "  decadent  " 
in  blank  verse. 

To  this  falling  away  in  sheer  workmanship 
the  playgoing  public  seems  to  have  been 
insensitive;  and  the  practitioners  themselves 
were  quite  complacent.      Shirley,  writing   a 


THE   LATER  DRAMATISTS       249 

prefatory  address  in  the  folio  edition  of 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher  in  1647,  speaks  of 
them  as  the  supreme  dramatists,  and  of  their 
work  as  "  the  greatest  monument  of  the  scene 
that  time  and  humanity  have  produced." 
Shirley  was  simply  an  inferior  workman,  who, 
himself  ncapable  of  good  verse  or  good 
drama,  could  not  see  the  vices  of  Fletcher's. 
The  strong  men  were  otherwise  occupied. 
Milton,  who  in  the  darkened  evening  of  his 
days  was  to  show  anew  what  blank  verse  in 
a  great  artist's  hand  could  be,  might  have 
told  his  countrymen  the  truth  ;  but  Milton, 
in  his  youth  the  enraptured  votary  of 
Shakespeare,  whose  art  he  best  of  all  men 
could  appraise,  was  now  up  to  the  neck  in 
the  political  and  ecclesiastical  warfare  which 
put  a  space  of  desolation  between  the  old 
drama  and  all  later  literature. 

Taking  that  drama  in  the  mass,  we  find  it 
to  consist,  perforce,  very  largely  of  unleisurely, 
hand-to-mouth  work ;  even  the  greatest  master 
being  saddled  with  a  good  deal  of  poor  stuff, 
some  of  it  not  even  retouched  by  him ;  while 
the  ablest  of  his  rivals  and  successors  are  to 
be  enjoyed  only  in  selections  of  their  more 
fortunate  pieces.  But  still  the  old  drama 
remains  the  most  remarkable  mass  of  literary 
production  in  modern  history  down  to  the 
nineteenth  century.  Its  sheer  mass  is  aston- 
ishing, especially  when  we  realize  that  there 
was  far  more  of  unpublished  than  of  pub- 


250      ELIZABETHAN   LITERATURE 

lished  work.  The  total  list  of  plays  of  which 
we  have  copies  or  documentary  mention  runs 
towards  two  thousand  ;  and  even  if  .we  count 
the  lost  plays  as  mostly  worse  than  the  saved, 
they  still  stand  collectively,  with  the  others, 
for  a  signal  effort  of  constructive  imagina- 
tion. And  their  particular  form  was  never 
recovered  after  it  was  worked  out  in  the 
period  before  the  Civil  War :  the  blank- 
verse  drama  of  the  Restoration  and  the 
eighteenth  century  never  attains  even  to  a 
second  place  as  compared  with  the  earlier 
mass  ;  and  the  poetic  drama  of  the  nine- 
teenth and  twentieth  centuries  remains  but 
an  academic  imitation.  Not  till  the  great 
development  of  the  novel  in  the  nineteenth 
century  do  we  find  an  equivalent  imaginative 
effort  to  that  made  in  the  preserved  drama 
of  Shakespeare's  age,  or  a  similar  energy  in 
the  artistic  reproduction  of  life.  That  is  to 
say,  the  old  drama  is  in  respect  of  its  time 
the  more  remarkable  evolution  of  the  two. 
In  its  typical  form,  it  grew  to  a  dazzling 
maturity  of  power  within  some  twenty  years, 
at  the  close  of  a  century  in  which  at  the 
outset  the  national  literature  was  but  getting 
its  "  fore-parts  "  out  of  the  soil  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  The  culture  which  acted  as  the  nutri- 
ment of  the  later  growth  is  insignificant  in 
comparison  with  that  which  went  to  the 
nourishment  of  nineteenth-century  fiction  in 
England  as  in  France.     In  respect  of  this 


THE   LATER  DRAMATISTS       251 

signal  precocity,  as  well  as  of  the  sheer  power 
of  the  performance  in  general,  it  continues 
to  command  the  wondering  interest  not  only 
of  the  English  but  of  other  peoples,  who  find 
its  vitality  as  incontestable  as  its  faults. 

The  fact  that  it  is  centred  by  one  of  the 
great  geniuses  of  all  literature  does  not  make 
the  totality  less  memorable :  indeed,  we 
might  almost  apply  to  that,  as  a  whole,  the 
figure  in  which  Diderot  maintained  against 
Voltaire  the  supremacy  of  Shakespeare  :  it 
is  to  the  coeval  drama  of  the  rest  of  Europe 
almost  as  was  the  rude  colossal  statue  of  St. 
Christopher  in  old  Paris  to  the  men  around, 
whose  stature  permitted  them  to  walk  be- 
tween its  legs.  Not  till  Corneille  did  French 
drama  attain  to  an  approximate  intellectual 
vigour  ;  not  till  Calderon  did  that  of  Spain 
rise  to  literary  greatness  ;  and  neither  in  the 
too  fertile  Calderon  nor  in  Corneille  is  there 
any  approach  to  the  wide  range  of  theme 
and  treatment  attained  by  the  English  stage 
before  their  time.  The  Elizabethan  drama, 
in  fine,  is  the  outstanding  literary  monument 
of  its  age,  and  one  of  the  most  notable  episodes 
in  all  literary  history. 

Later  times  have  made  much  of  their  in- 
tellectual sensations  ;  but  it  may  be  left  to 
any  lover  of  sheer  literature  to  say  whether 
any  of  these  are  to  be  matched  with  the  ex- 
perience of  men  who  in  the  space  of  some 
dozen  years  could  go  successively  to  "  first 


252      ELIZABETHAN  LITERATURE 

nights "  in  which  they  could  hear  for  the 
first  time  the  Unes  of  Lorenzo  : 

In  such  a  night 
Stood  Dido  with  a  willow  in  her  hand 
Upon  the  wild  sea  banks,  and  waved  her  love 
To  come  again  to  Carthage  ; 

and  Hamlet's 

Revisit'st  thus  the  glimpses  of  the  moon — 

and  Macbeth's 

Methought  I  heard  a  voice  cry  "  Sleep  no  more  I  "  ; 

and  the  death-hailing  Cleopatra's 

Give  me  my  robe,  put  on  my  crown,  I  have 

Immortal  longings  in  me  ;    now  no  more 

The  juice  of  Egypt's  grape  shall  moist  this  lip  ; 

and  Perdita's 

Daffodils 
That  come  before  the  swallow  dares,  and  take 
The  winds  of  March  with  beauty  ; 

and  Prospero's  mighty  period.  For  us  to 
whom  such  things  are  radiances  from  the 
past,  there  is  the  consolation  of  surmising  that 
after  all  no  one  in  that  day,  probably,  de- 
lighted in  them  quite  so  much  as  we  can. 


BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   NOTE 


Chapteb  I. — General  Subvbts  1 

The  fullest  record  of  English  literary  history  yet  produced  is  the  Cambridge 
History  of  English  Literature,  now  in  progress,  which  is  to  cover  the  whole 
field.  Ih  the  volume  of  Prof.  Saintsbury  on  Elizabethan  Literature  (Mac- 
millan)  there  are  many  just  judgments.  Of  compact  surveys,  the  handbook 
of  Thomas  Seccombe  and  J.  W.  Allen,  The  Age  of  Shakespeare  (2  vols. : 
(MacmiJlan  is  perhaps  the  most  useful  to  the  student.  Prof.  F.  E.  Schelling's 
Elizabethan  Drama,  1558-1642  (Houghton  Mifflin,  2  vols.,  1911)  is  a  full  yet 
concise  record.  ^  j 

Chapter  II. — ^Frose  before  Sidney 

In  the  first  vol.of  the  rearranged  ed.  of  Prof.  Arber's  ""English  Garner  ** 
(Dutton,  12  vols.)  is  a  useful  collection  of  Fifteenth  Century  Prose  and  Verse, 
edited  by  A.  W.  Pollard.  The  early  Protestant  prose  writers  are  easily  to 
be  procured  second-hand  at  low  prices  in  the  reprints  of  the  Parker  Society. 
*'  Arber's  Reprints  "  (Constable)  include  the  translations  of  Richard  Eden 
on  The  Newe  India  (large  4to)  ;  and  the  rearranged  "  Garner  "  includes  2 
vols,  of  Voyages  and  Travels  of  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  centuries. 
Vixlson's  Arte  of  Rhetorique  is  rep.  in  " Tudor  and  Stuart  Library"  (Clar. 
Press,"  1909) ;  and  Hoby  s  trans,  of  the  Cortigiano  in  the  "  Tudor  Transla- 
tions." 

Chapter  III. — Poetry  before  Spenser 

TotteVs  Miscellany  is  among  "Arber's  Reprints."  Wyatt's  and  Surrey's 
Poems,  are  reprinted  in  the  "  Aldine  "  series  (Macmillan).  Arber's  Surrey 
and  Wyatt  Anthology  and  Spenser  Anthology  give  a| general  selection.  Gas- 
coigne's  Works  are  now  well  edited  by  Professor  John  W.  Cunlifife  (2  vols.)  : 
Camb.    Univ.  Press).     Barnabe  Googe's  poems  are  among  "Arber's  Re- 

Erints  " ;  and  Howell's  Devises  have  been  included  in  the  "  Tudor  and  Stuart 
ribrary." 

Chapter  IV. — Spenser 

A  fully  annotated  edition  of  Spenser  is  one  of  the  great  desiderata  of  Eng- 
lish literary  history,  but  the  Globe  ed.  and  that  of  Smith  and  De  Selincourt 
(Prowde)  give  good  introductions,  glossaries,  and  notes  of  variant  readings. 
Among  the  best  critical  essays  on  Spenser  are  those  of  Prof.  Mackail  (in  The 
Springs  of  Uelicon  :  Longmans,  1909)  ;  Lowell  (in  Among  my  Books,  rep.  in 
English  Poets, "  Camelot  Classics  "),  and  Minto  (in  Characteristics  of  English 
Poets :  Ginn). 

Chapter  V.— Pre-Shakespearean  Drama 

Prof.  A.  W.  Ward's  History  of  English  Dramatic  Literature  to  the  Death  of 
Queen  Anne)  revised  ed.,  3  vols.,  1899  :  Macmillan)  is  the  standard  treatise 
of  the  kind.  The  volumes  on  English  Miracle  Plays  by  A.  W.  Pollard  (1890) 
and  on  Early  English  Classical  Tragedies,  by  Prof.  J.  W.  Cunliffe  (1912 : 
both  Clar.  Press) ,  give  good  texts  and  introductions. 

Apart  from  the  various  collected  editions  of  Lilly,  Kyd,  Marlowe,  Greene, 
and  Peele,  a  number  of  single  plays  by  these  authors  are  produced  in  the 
"  Temple "  series,  as  are  Selimus,  Arden  of  Feversham,  and  Edward  III, 
Others  are  reprinted  by  the  Malone  Society.  Of  the  "  Shakespeare  Apocry- 
pha " — the  plays  ascribed  falsely,  or  on  the  score  of  portions,  to  Shake- 
speare—the best  [collection  is  that  edited  by  C.  F.  Tucker-Brooke  (Clar. 


254         BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTE 


Press,  1908)  with  introduction,  notes  and  bibliography.  As  to  the  author- 
ship of  Arden  of  Feversham,  see  Mr.  Charles  Crawford's  Collectanea,  1st 
Series  (Stratford,  1906). 

Chapter  VI. — The  Great  Prose 

Sidney^ s'Apologie  for  Poetrie  and  the  Fight  of  the  Revenge  are  among 
Arber's  cheap  reprints  :  the  Acadia  is  included  in  the  "  Cambridge  English 
Classics  "  series.  Of  Florio's  [Montaigne  there  are  reprints  by  Routledge 
and  Dent :  of  Holland's  trans,  of  Plutarch's  Moralia  a  selection  in  one  vol. 
is  included  in  the  "  Everyman's  Library."  Nashe  is  admirably  edited  by 
Mr,  McKerrow  (4  vols. :  Bullen). 

Chapter  VII. — Poetry  after  Spenser 

Cheap  reprints  of  Daniel  and  Drayton  are  lacking ;  but  Daniel  is  edited 
in  5  vols,  by  Grosart  (1885-86).  Drayton's  Polyolbion  and  Harmony  of  the 
Church  were  reprinted  in  1876  (3  vols.  :  Russell  Smith),  and  other  poems, 
by  Collier,  in  1856.  Prof.  O.  Elton's  monograph  on  Drayton  (1905)  is  ex- 
cellent. The  sonnets  of  Drayton  and  Daniel,  and  the  other  .collections  of 
the  period,  are  included  in  Arber's  "English  Garner"  (12  vols. :  Dutton). 
Chapman's  Minor  Poems  fill  one  vol.  of  the  three-vol.  ed.  by  Shepherd. 
Campion  is  best  edited  by  Mr.  Bullen,  who  has  also  made  charming  collec- 
tions from  the  Elizabethan  song-books. 

Chapter  VIII. — Shakespeare 

The  Globe  editions  and  that  of  Craig  (Frowde)  supply  careful  texts";  and 
the  "Arden"  ediLion  (Heath)  presents  a  full  apparatus  criticus  for  each  of 
the  plays  singly.  In  the  matter  of  eesthetic  criticism,  the  student  may  use- 
fully start  with  Coleridge's  Lectures  (Dutton)  and  Lamb's  essay  On  Shake- 
speare's Tragedies,  and  go  on  to  Prof.  A.  C.  Bradley's  Shakespearean  Trag' 
edy  (Macmillan) — the  finest  'work  ever  done  in  that  field.  The  best  short 
monograph  is  that  of  'Prof.  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  ("Men  of  Letters"  series). 
Sir!  Sidney  Lee's  Life  most  fully  covers  the  ground  ;  but  that  by  the  late 
F.  G.  Fleay,  as  also  that  writer's  Shakespeare  Manual,  should  be  studied  by 
those  concerned  to  know  the  history  of  the  plays. 

Chapter  IX. — Prose  Fiction 

Euphues  is  available  in  Arber's  reprint :  Greene's  works  are  collected  only 
in  the  14-vol.  edition  of  Grosart.  But  Menaphon  is  included  in  Arber's 
"English  Scholar's  Library";  Pandosto  in  Hazlitt's  "Shakespeare  Li- 
brary " ;  and  the  Groatsworth  of  Wit  in  the  New  Sh.  Soc.  "  Shakespeare 
Allusion  Books,"  Pt.  I.,  1874.  Lodge's  Works  have  been  collected  only  in 
the  scarce  and  expensive  Hunterian  Society  rep.,  edited  by  Dr.  Gosse  ;  but 
Rosalynde  is  in  Hazlitt's  "Shakespeare  Library,"  and  in  the  "Shakespeare 
Classics"  series  (Chatto).  Forhonius  and  Prisceria  is  in  one  of  the  old  Sh. 
Soc.  vols,  of  reprints,  with  other  items.  Deloney's  Works  are  edited  in  one 
vol.  by  Mr.  F.  O.  Mann.  (Clar.  Press). 

Chapter  X. — ^The  Later  Dramatists 

Most  of  these  are  easily  procurable  in  various  editions  ;  and  select  plays 
from  most  are  included  in  the  "  Mermaid  "  series. 


INDEX 


Addison,  8, 10 

jEneid,  translations  of,  60  sq. 
Apius  and  Virginia,  87 
Arden  of  Faversham^  100 
Aretino,  46 
Ariosto,  73,  76, 140 
Aristotle,  138,  139 
Ascham,  24,  36  sq.,  61 
Augustan  period,  10, 163 

Bacon,  11, 16,  20,  74, 117, 128  sq. 

Baldwin,  60 

Bale,  85 

Barclay,  11,  12 

Barnes,  143 

Barnfield,  144 

Beaumont,  169 

—  and  Fletcher,  243  sq.,  249 
Berners,  11,  32  sq. 

Bible,  translations  of,  30  sq. 

Blank  verse,  51,  68,  89, 197,  247 

Boccaccio,  58,  204 

Bodin  129 

Browne,  Sir  T.,  10, 127 

—  W.,  163 

Calvin,  119 

Campion,  170  sq, 

Casaubon,  33 

Caxton,  19 

Chapman,  9,  160, 161  sq.,  193,  232 

238  5?.,  245,  247 
Chau<er,  12, 13,  23,  44,  65,  201  sq. 
Cheke,  34a'?.,40,  41 
Chettle,  106,170 
Cicero,  21 

Coleridge,  8, 150, 153 
Colet,  20 
Columbus,  20 
Comines,  136  jj. 
Conrad,  199 
Constable,  143, 146 
Coventry  Mysteries,  42,  43 
Covordale,  21,  31 

Danett,  136  sq. 

Daniel,  61,  95, 143  sq.,  153  sq. 

Dante,  76 

Darwin,  7 

Davies,  146, 150  sq. 

Dekker,  113,  170, 181,  323,  231  sq. 

Deloney,  221  sq. 

DeMornay,  119 

Douglas,  50,  53  5g. 


Dramaj^^^ly  Tudor,  15,  93 

—  French,  90  sq. 

—  pre-Shakespearean,  86  sq, 

—  post-Shakespearean,  224  sq. 
Drayton,  40,  61,  82,  83,  111,  112, 

117, 144  52,,  153  52.,  181 
Dryden,  10  _ 

Du  Bellay,  68  ^ — ' 

Eden,  28  sq. 
Edward  I II., 10^ 
Edwards,  86 
Elyot,  21 
Erasmus,  20,  21 
Euphuism,  33,  37  sq, 

Fairfax,  140  sq. 
Fenton,  136 
Fiction,  18, 19,  200  sq. 
Fleay,  193 
Fleming,  55 
Fletcher,  G-.,  143 

—  J.,  169,  244,  246,  247,  248 
Florio,  136, 138  sq. 

Ford,  245 
Fortescue,  19 
Fox,  27  sq, 

Garnier,  92,  96 

Gascoigne,  62  sq.  70, 89, 174,  206  SQ. 

Gilbert,  17 

Golding,  56, 119 

Googe,  66  sq. 

Gosson,  86,  120,  122 

Greene^7,  79,  96  sq.,  177, 182  sq.t 

■  185  "216  sq. 
Griffin,  144 
Grimald,  55 
Guevara,  32  sq.,  36, 121 

Hackett,  94 

Hall,  Bishop,  174  sq. 

—  Edward,  24  sq. 
Hardy,  91 
Harington,  140  sq. 
Harriott,  17, 18 
Harvey,  17,  69 
Hawes,  11,  12-14 
Heliodorus,  118,  210 
Herrick,  142 
Heywood,  John,  11 

—  Thomas,  170,  234,  237  sq.,  244 
Hoby,  34  sq. 

Hoccleve,  12 


256 


INDEX 


Holland,  P.,  13653. 
Homer,  77,164  52. 
Hooker,  11, 128  sq. 
Howell,  65  sq. 
Hughes,  52,  89 

Italian  poetry,  46  sq, 

Jodelle,  91 

Jonson,  11,  135,  155,  160  sq,,  165, 
170, 176, 224  5g.,  240, 243 

Keats,  8,  9 

Kyd,  95,  96  sq.,  177 

Lamb,  198 

Latimer,  24 

Lilly,  24,  37  sq.,  95,  97  sq.,  117  sq., 

jhs,2oe  sq. 
Lodge,  108  sq.,  122, 143, 145, 166  sq., 

174,  211  sq. 
Luther,  20 
Lydgate,  12,  14,  58 

Malory,  19 

Markham,  123 

Marlowe,  11,  15,  78, 101  sq.,  159  sq., 

176, 177,  224 
Marot,  68,  71 

Marston,  174  sq.,  229,  231,  232,  241 
Massinger,  243, 245,  246,  247 
Middleton,  181 
Milton,  77,  82,  249 
Mirrour  for  Magistrates,  58  sq.,  167 
Montaigne,  121,  131,  138  517. 
More,  Sir  T.,  16,  20,  21,  22,  26,  59, 

129 
Munday,  170, 181 

Nashe,  55, 106, 126  sq.,  168,  219  sq. 

North,  32  sq. 

Nut-Brown.  Maid,  The,  12, 42  sq. 

Painter,  203  sq, 

Pecock,  19 

PeeJiv7i^  96  sq.,  168, 181 

Percy,  W.^  144 

Petrarch,  68 

Plato,  21 

Plutarch,  136  sq. 

Polydore  Vergil,  26 

Pope,  8,  9 

Porter,  246 

Prose,  art  of,  20  sq.,  117  sq. 


Raleigh,  123  5?.,  137 
Reformation,  effects  of,  20,  22,  27, 

115 
Return  from  Parnassus,  The,  227 
Rogers,  31 
Rolle,  23 
Rosseter,  170  sq. 
Roye,  174 

Sackville,  11,  52  sq.,  67  sq.,  61, 68 

Sandys,  22 

Science,  18 

Selimus,  105 

Seneca,  57,  89 

Shakespeare,  11,  40,  144,  147  sq., 

159,  I60  5^.,  175  5?.,  217,  227,  229, 

240,  245,  252 
ShMey,  2'.^2,  249 
Sidney,  83,  84,  96,  97,  117,  118  sq., 

143  sq.,  208  sq. 
Skelton,  11,174 
Smith,  W.,  144 
Songs,  167  sq. 
Sonnets,  143  sq. 

Sp  user,  11,  66  sq.,  117, 140  sq.,  156 
Stanyhurst,  55 

Steruhold  and  Hopkins,  43  sq.,  47 
Still,  86 

Surrey,  11,  12,  44  sq.,  168,  247 
Swift,  JO 

Tasso,  73,  76, 140 

Taylor,  Jeremy,  10 

TotteVs  Miscellany,  12,  42  sq.,  63 

Tourneur,  245 

Tras^edy,  decline  of,  242  sq. 

Twine,  55 

Tyndale,  19,  20,  21,  22 

Udall,  86 
Underdowne,  118,  136 

Vander  Noodt,  68 
Vaux,  52  sq. 

Walton,  227 
Wat9on,  143 
Webster,  181,  241,  245 
Whetstone,  65,  97 
Wilkins,  236 
Wilmot,  89 
Wilson,  41 

Wordsworth,  8, 153. 155 
Wyatt,  11-14,  44*5'.,  168 
Wynkyn  de  Worde,  19 


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By  Sir  H.  H.  Johnston.  The  first  living  authority  on  the  subject 
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By  J.  Arthur  Thomson  and  Patrick  Geddes,  joint  authors  of  The 
Evolution  of  Sex. 

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By  J.  B.  Farmer,  D.  Sc,  F.  R.  S.,  Professor  of  Botany  in  the  Impe- 
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By  A.  Keith,  M.  D.,  Hunterian  Professor,  Royal  College  of  Sur- 
geons.    Shows  how  the  human   body   developed. 

74.  Nerves. 

By  David  Eraser  Harris,  M.  D.,  Professor  of  Physiology,  Dalhousie 
University,  Halifax.  Explains  in  non-technical  language  the  place 
and  powers  of  the  nervous  system,  more  particularly  of  those  regions 
of  the  system  whose  activities  are  not  associated  with  the  rousing  of 
consciousness. 

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By  Prof.  J.  Arthur  Thomson,  Science  Editor  of  the  Home  Univer- 
sity Library.  For  those  unacquainted  with  the  scientific  volumes  in 
the  series,  this  would  prove  an  excellent  introduction. 

14.  Evolution. 

By  Prof.  J.  Arthur  Thomson  and  Prof.  Patrick  Geddes.  Explains 
to  the  layman  what  the  title  means  to  the  scientific  world. 

23.  Astronomy. 

By  A.  R.  HiNKS,  Chief  Assistant  at  the  Cambridge  Observatory. 
"Decidedly  original  in  substance,  and  the  most  readable  and  informa- 
tive little  book  on  modern  astronomy  we  have  seen  for  a  long  time." 

— Nature. 

24.  Psychical  Research. 

By  Prof.  W.  F.  Barrett,  formerly  President  of  the  Society  for 
Psychical  Research.     A  strictly  scientific  examination. 


9.  The  Evolution  of  Plants. 

By  Dr.  D.  H.  Scott,  President  of  the  Linnean  Society  of  London. 
The  story  of  the  development  of  flowering  plants,  from  the  earliest 
zoological  times,  unlocked  from  technical  language. 

43.  Matter  and  Energy. 

By  F.  SoDDY,  Lecturer  in  Physical  Chemistry  and  Radioactivity, 
University  of  Glasgow.  "Brilliant.  Can  hardly  be  surpassed.  Sure 
to  attract  attention." — New  York  Sun. 

41.  Psychology,  The  Study  of  Behaviour. 

By  William  McDougall,  of  Oxford.  A  w-ell  digested  summary  of 
the  essentials  of  the  science  put  in  excellent  literary  form  by  a  lead- 
ing authority. 

42.  The  Principles  of  Physiology. 

By  Prof.  J.  G.  McKendrick.  ^  A  compact  statement  by  the  Emeritus 
Professor   at  Glasgow,  for   unlnstructed   readers. 

37.  Anthropology. 

By  R.  R.  Marett,  Reader  in  Social  Anthropology,  Oxford.  Seeks  to 
plot  out  and  sura  up  the  general  series  of  changes,  bodily  and  mental, 
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17.  Crime  and  Insanity. 

By  Dr.   C.  A.   Mekcier,  author  of  Text-Book  of  Insanity,  etc. 

12.  The  Animal  World. 

By  Prof.  F.  W.  Gamble. 

15.  Introduction  to  Mathematics. 

By  A.  N.  Whitehead,  author  of  Universal  Algebra. 

PHILOSOPHY  AND  RELIGION 

69.  A  History  of  Freedom  of  Thought. 

By  John  B.  Bury,  M.  A.,  LL.  D.,  Regius  Professor  of  Modern  His- 
tory in  Cambridge  University.  Summarizes  the  history  of  the  long 
struggle  between  authority  and  reason  and  of  the  emergence  of  the 
principle  that  coercion  of  opinion  is  a  mistake. 

55.  Missions :  The^'r  Rise  and  Development. 

By  Mrs.  Mandell  Creighton,  author  of  History  of  England.  The 
author  seeks  to  prove  that  missions  have  done  more  to  civilize  the 
world  than  any  other  human  agency. 

52.  Ethics. 

By  G.  E.  Moore,  Lecturer  in  Moral  Science,  Cambridge.  Discusses 
what  is  right  and  what  is  wrong,  and  the  whys  and  wherefores. 

65.  The  Literature  of  the  Old  Testament. 

By  George  F.  Moore,  Professor  of  the  History  of  Religion,  Harvard 
University.  "A  popular  work  of  the  highest  order.  Will  be  profit- 
able to  anybody  who  cares  enough  about  Bible  study  to  read  a  serious 
book  on  the  subject." — American  Journal  of  Theology. 

50.  The  Making  of  the  New  Testament. 

By  B.  W.  Bacon,  Professor  of  New  Testament  Criticism,  Yale.  An 
authoritative  summary  of  the  results  of  modern  critical  research 
with  regard  to  the  origins  of  the  New  Testament. 


35.  The  Problems  of  Philosophy. 

By  Bertrand  Russell,  Lecturer  and  Late  Fellow,  Trinity  College, 
Cambridge. 

44.  Buddhism. 

By  Mrs.  Rhys  Davids,  Lecturer  on  Indian  Philosophy,  Manchester. 
A  review  of  that  religion  and  bodj;^  of  culture  which  is  to  a  large 
part  of  the  human  race,  chiefly  situated  in  Southern  Asia,  what 
Christianity  is  to  us  of  the  West. 

46.  English  Sects:  A  History  of  Nonconformity. 

By  W.  B.  Selbie,  Principal  of  Manchester  College,  Oxford. 

60.  Comparative  Religion. 

By  Prof.  J.  Estlin  Carpenter.  "One  of  the  few  authorities  on  this 
subject  compares  all  the  religions  to  see  what  they  have  to  offer  on 
the  great  themes  of  religion." — Christian  Work  and  Evangelist. 

LITERATURE  AND  ART 

73.  Euripides  and  His  Age. 

By  Gilbert  Murray,  Regius  Professor  of  Greek,  Oxford.  Brings 
before  the  reader  an  undisputedly  great  poet  and  thinker,  an  amaz- 
ingly successful  playwright,  and  a  figure  of  high  significance  in  the 
history  of  humanity. 

81.  Chaucer  and  His  Times. 

By  Grace  E.  Hadow,  Lecturer  Lady  Margaret  Hall,  Oxford;  Late 
Reader,  Bryn  Mawr. 

70.  Ancient  Art  and  Ritual. 

By  Jane  E.  Harrison,  LL,  D.,  D.  Litt.  "One  of  the  100  most  impor- 
tant books  of   1913." — Nezv  York  Times  Review. 

61.  The  Victorian  Age  in  Literature. 

By  G.  K.  Chesterton.  The  most  powerfully  sustained  and  brilliant 
piece  of  writing  Mr.  Chesterton  has  yet  published. 

59.  Dr.  Johnson  and  His  Circle. 

By  John  Bailey.  Johnson's  life,  character,  works,  and  friendships 
are  surveyed;  and  there  is  a  notable  vindication  of  the  "Genius  of 
Boswell." 

58.  The  Newspaper. 

By  G.  Binney  Dibblee.  The  first  full  account,  from  the  inside,  of 
newspaper  organization  as  its  exists  to-day. 

62.  Painters  and  Painting. 

By  Sir  Frederick  Wedmore.     With  16  half-tone  illustrations. 

64.  The  Literature  of  Germany. 

By  J.  G.  Robertson. 

48.  Great  Writers  of  America. 

By  W.  P.  Trent  and  John  Erskine,  of  Columbia  University.  Gives 
the  essential  facts  as  to  the  lives  and  works  of  Franklin,  Washington 
Irving,  Bryant,  Cooper,  Hawthorne,  Poe,  Emerson,  and  the  other 
Transcendentalists,  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  and  the  other  New  Eng- 
land poets,  Motley  and  the  other  historians,  Webster  and  Abraham 
Lincoln,  Mrs.  Stowe,  Walt  Whitman,  Bret  Harte,  and  Mark  Twain. 


40.  The  English  Language. 

By  L.  P.  Smith.  A  concise  history  of  the  origin  and  development 
of  the  English  language.  "Has  certainly  managed  to  include  a  vast 
amount  of  information,  and,  while  his  writing  is  clear  and  lucid,  he 
is  always  in  touch  with  life." — The  Athenaeum. 

45.  Medieval  English  Literature. 

By  W.  P.  Ker,  Professor  of  English  Literature,  University  College, 
London.  "One  of  the  soundest  scholars.  His  style  is  effective,  sim- 
ple, yet  never  dry." — The  Athenaeum. 

27.  Modern  English  Literature. 

By  G.  H.  Mair.  From  Wyatt  and  Surrey  to  Synge  and  Yeats.  **A 
most  suggestive  book,  one  of  the  best  of  this  great  series." — Chicago 
Evening  Post. 

2.  Shakespeare. 

By  John  Masefield.  "One  of  the  very  few  indispensable  adjuncts 
to  a  Shakespearean  Library." — Boston  Transcript. 

31.  Landmarks  in  French  Literature. 

By  G.  L.  Strachey,  Scholar  of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge.  "For  a 
survey  of  the  oustanding  figures  of  French  literature  with  an  acute 
analysis  of  the  contribution  which  each  made  to  his  time  and  to  the 
general  mass  there  has  been  no  book  as  yet  published  so  judicially 
interesting." — The  Chautauquan. 

38.  Architecture. 

By  Prof.  W.  R.  Lethaby.  An  introduction  to  the  history  and 
theory  of  the  art  of  building.  "Professor  Lethaby's  scholarship  and 
extraordinary  knowledge  of  the  most  recent  discoveries  of  archaeo- 
logical research  provide  the  reader  with  a  new  outlook  and  with  new 
facts." — The  Athenaeum. 

66.  Writing  English  Prose. 

By  William  T.  Brewster,  Professor  of  English,  Columbia  Univer- 
sity. "Should  be  put  into  the  hands  of  every  man  who  is  beginning 
to  write  and  of  every  teacher  of  English  that  has  brains  enough  to 
understand  sense." — New  York  Sun. 

83.  William  Morris :  His  Work  and  Influence. 

By  A.  Glutton  Brock,  author  of  Shelley:  The  Man  and  the  Poet. 
William  Morris  believed  that  the  artist  si  Id  toil  for  love  of  his 
work  rather  than  the  gain  of  his  employer,  and  so  he  turned  from 
making  works  of  art  to  remaking  society. 

OTHER   VOLUMES  IN  PREPARATION. 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 
34  West  33d  Street  New  York 


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